It’s hard to go on vacation nowadays, at least for me. Most hotels have internet access and the ability to connect is almost aways there. So here I am typing away at seven in the morning from my room in Lake Louise. This is an addiction – an addiction to the news and to the online phonemenon. it is also a fear of not being au courant, of the moment slipping away from me. But what is my knowledge of the moment anyway? Only the most miniscule slices of some illusory reality. And yet I feel compelled to find out. I go online during my vacation, though I promise myself only briefly. Still, bits of information intrude … Kofi Annan blaming the Israelis (of course) for atttacking an Hezbollah guerrilla unit that was importing arms, some blogger I had never heard of before instigating a letter writing campaign against Hollywood types who had the temerity to sign a rather bland statement supporting Israel. Never mind that these so-called addresses are care of the celebrities’ agents (and therefore probably will never get through), the actions of this hitherto (to me) anonymous person set my blood to boil – here in the most perfect natural setting, looking up at a glacier.

In some sense I admit I have always been an exception with this compulsion to know. But how much of an exception? I suspect not all that much. Indeed, as a kid, I can recall many of my friends memorizing sports scores and batting averages, not that different an impulse, if you think about it. But I fear for our future. As information intrudes everywhere, it will become harder and harder to find peace – unless we find it in ourselves… not always an easy thing.

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… but most of us are having difficulty finding it – except for the Wilson Quarterly , which features an essay called “Europe’s Mosque Hysteria” by Martin Walker (editor of United Press Iinternational, no less). Roger Kimball, writing with distinction, as always, at Armavirumque, rejects Walker’s optimistic view of “the rich variety of Muslim immigration.” Worth your time.

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Anyone who remains skeptical about the absolute necessity of oil conversation and alternative energey ought to have a look at this article on “how the world works now.” Hezbollah is popping $12000 wads of cash into the hands of South Lebanese who have had their houses destroyed – the money obviously direct from the Mullah’s Gas Pumps. Result: the Lebanese love Hezbollah, cementing Nasrallah & Co’s hold on that semi-existent country.

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Gal Mor’s article on YNet asks if fauxtography is going to be par for the course in conflicts of the future? I wouldn’t be surprised. But I think it would be worth our whiles to look into the past as well. My guess is that many famous war photographs pre-Photoshop were faux in their own way (staged), even famous ones like the Robert Capa dying soldier in the Spanish Civil War and the napalmed child in Vietnam. We all know Mohammed al-Doura was a complete phony. No one needed to Photoshop that.

It’s also true that much regular text reporting is often faux, as we know (naux?). And we have learned that the vast percentage of war video footage comes from the same source and is therefore tilted it the same direction. What are we to make of all this? Are we all living in a false reality? Pretty much, apparently, and it’s not just the normal solipsism we discover as adolescents. One of the few good things to come out of the Israel-Hezbollah War was further acknowledgment of this deception. The nature of news is changing. Few people believe in news organizations as “authorities” any more. The New York Times, as we knew it, is dead. So, to a greater or lesser degree, are its cohorts. We may be moving toward an era in which the most respected news sources are the ones that most honestly admit their biases and make no pretense whatsoever of complete objectivity.

I have been involved in this change, to my own small extent, with the evolution of Pajamas Media. It is now getting closer to what some of us envisioned it to be in the beginning ( a couple of years ago when some bloggers began talking to each other), but it is still a ways off. It’s a process, like most other things of interest. For the first time since we started I am away on a vacation (well, sort of) in the Canadian Rockies and able to look at the the Pajamas site from afar, somewhat more the way a news consumer does. Over the next few days I may learn some things, I couldn’t understand as easily at close hand. We shall see. We shall also see if I can get a photograph of an elk. If not, I shall have to Photoshop it.

UPDATE: Of course the photo above was Robert Capa, not Robert Frank, as several have pointed out to me. Perhaps I shouldn’t be posting such long screeds while jetlagged and supposedly beginning a short vacation. Also, of the photos mentioned aboved, the one of Kim Phuc in Vietnam remains under dispute. Still, the overall point holds.

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I am on vaction in the Canadian Rockies. Blogging will be low, but maybe there will be some pictures. Elks, anyone?

As it happens, about twenty minutes after writing this, I saw my first elk, standing in front of our hotel here in Banff. Madeleine and I were on our way to the hot springs. Recommended.

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Suha Arafat remarries:

Two years ago, after Arafat’s death, Suha was personally promised by Mahmoud Abbas’ staff that she would receive USD 22 million a year, on the basis of an agreement Arafat himself sent his wife while on his death bed ‚Äì USD 11 million to cover her lifestyle in Paris for half year.

How much a year goes to the Palestinians an aid?

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As many of you have already seen, the new PJM site, which we have been working on behind the scenes, is up. We have been structuring it to make available as much of our new content as possible (in text, podcast and vide forms) and to link closely with Politics Central, where much of the archiving will be done. We are growing and learning (beginning anyway).

ONE MORE THING: I would like to call everyone’s attention to Nelson Ascher’s essay The Uses of Anti-Semitism, one of most interesting works we have published since we started in November.

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I enjoy reading the cable news numbers on Drudge. For this week something positive – Brit Hume Show, the only show I really like, is in second place:

FOXNEWS O’REILLY 2,059,000
FNX BRIT HUME 1,614,000
FNC HANNITY/COLMES 1,496,000
FNC GRETA 1,485,000
FNC SHEP SMITH 1,179,000
CNN LARRY KING 805,000
CNN COOPER 798,000
CNN DOBBS 678,000
CNN ZAHN 669,000
MSNBC HARDBALL 456,000
MSNBC INVESTIGATES 451,000
MSNBC OLBERMANN 363,000
CNNHN GLENN BECK 354,000
CNNHN NANCY GRACE 335,000

Now the mystery – Why are Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann still employed? I mean they’ve had their chance, haven’t they? It’s been a while. Can’t MSNBC come up with something better than that?

MEANWHILE: Also on Drduge without a link:

NYT WEDS: Ned Lamont preparing to shake up staff, refocus his race in appeal to Connecticut moderates… Developing…

There’s only one way to intrepet that. Lamont’s internal poll numbers must be much worse than the Rasmussen poll published immediately after the primary showing him trailing Lieberman by six points. “Developing” is indeed the right word in this instance.

UPDATE: Of course this AP report may have something to do with it:

Democratic Senate candidate Ned Lamont apologized Tuesday for his campaign manager’s description of Waterbury as a place ”where the forces of slime meet the forces of evil.”

Tom Swan’s comment caused a furor in industrial Waterbury, which voted overwhelmingly for Lamont’s opponent, Sen. Joe Lieberman, in last week’s primary.

”Look, I understand that Tom made some comments. I think they’re unfortunate. We apologize for them,” Lamont said on WATR-AM.

MORE: The NYT article is up and Lamont seems to be sticking with his boy Swan. Who cares? Meanwhile, hypocrisy is oozing from his campaign as the hundred millionaire JP Morganite heir is positioning himself as “an outsider,” poor thing. Power to the People, I say. What a joke! Why doesn’t this yahoo do the right thing and contribute his zillions to medical reasearch in the Gates mode and really do something for people ? The Times’ article has these telling graphs:

Some Lamont allies have privately expressed disdain for the idea of bringing on any outside consultants, noting that most big-name Democratic consultants had shown little willingness to help Mr. Lamont when he was an obscure businessman running a long-shot campaign.

“I don’t want to hire any of those big-fee consultant types from Washington who just want to come in and make money off of Ned,” Mr. Swan said. “We won the primary on Ned’s message; we can win the general in a similar way.”

Obscure businessman?! Right on, bro’. Stick it to the man.

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CNN has a history of bias when it comes to covering war and other subjects in the Middle East. We needn’t rehearse that here, except to note this latest pathetic example. But Fox News too has appeared to join, at least in part, the Whores of Hezbollah. Their Beirut correspondent Jonathan Hunt fairly bragged tonight that his network was the only one admitted by Hezbollah into Beirut’s southern suburbs to repeat the same shots we have seen ad nauseum, adding the weird discalimer they were not allowed to show the faces of the terrorists (he didn’t call them that, of course) themselves. Hunt has been particularly egregious throughout the conflict, a perfect example of the British yellow journalism tradition, swallowing whole every propagandistic tidbit, parroting back without question the Lebanese government “civilian” death figures, which turn out to be about 1000 in any case, a rather astonishingly low number for a month of conflict. (Compare that to thirty minutes of 9/11.) One wonders what Brit Hume was thinking when forced to cut to this character during his nightly reports. Fox, in general, has a pretty low level of in the field reporting, but so do all of them.

MORE MEDIA BIAS: This time from the AP. Their headline at this hour (22:14 PDT) reads – Rockets hit Lebanon despite cease-fire. There’s no indication in the headline, of course, that these are Hezbollah katyushas hitting their own country (which is the case if you read the article). Would the reader naturally assume these rockets were coming from Israel or fired by Israeli forces? Bias or bad writing? You decide.

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The cartoon scandal reconceived in Tehran. Unfortunately, it’s not just Iran. Racism… or should I say “tolerancia“… is back in otro sitios.

UPDATE: Yes, it’s supposed to be a joke, I suppose. [Why aren't you laughing?-ed. He perdido mi sentido del humor.]

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