ok - so my website has become a real mess - and even i cant get any more denserer... apologies to anyone who tried to read it - it kinda grew incrementally from just a few sentences under each pic, and is now totally unreadable... the war has also started, and i havent really changed the website since the bombing started - so ive decided to switch to this medium, and i hope to be able to talk in fullerer sentences, and break the constraints of lukeryland...

ill try to be less obscure here than the website. i dont have any agenda - i dont think ill convince anyone of anything. im not really gonna comment on the minutia of the invasion - i dont know anything about the factions or the geography or the people or any of that jazz. i dont know anything about military stuff... i dont really know the difference between a sortie and getting sorted... except they maybe feel a bit similar - the come down is terrible, but one costs a lot more than the other.

i do however know a little about media, and the english language, and propaganda and i have a unhealthy level of skepticism, so ill probably be raising questions about things that dont make sense to me... not about whether i think i think saddam is dead today, but maybe about some stupid freeped cnn internet poll about whether the american population thinks he is dead, not about whether the green fwd arrows on the multimedia displays go in the correct directions, but maybe whether there is a crack in matrix in the language that is used by the aggressors, and how that crack might be interpreted, and whether that points to some form of spin, and what reality might exist within that vortex.

have i lost u yet?

for the record - i think this war is a horrible idea at many levels. i think killing people is bad. i abhor the US administration. i abhor the imperialism and religionism and racism. i dont necessarily believe that 'oil' is the simple explanation. i dont necessarily believe the zionist story. i dont necessarily subscribe to the PNAC story. i dont necessarily subscribe to the 'daddy's unfinished business' story. i struggle to find a logical reason, a consistent motivation... except that power corrupts

i do believe that the US mainstream media is guiltily complicit, although im not sure for what reason. to the extent that i understand network tv economics, advertising dollars are pretty important. and i also know that advertisers try to shy away from having their brand associated with murder, including govt-sanctioned killings, and i also know that running these enhanced war-time news operations is expensive... so i guess the networks are running at a loss during the war - and that inherently assumes that they will make up those losses elsewhere. i dont know how they can do that, cos that assumes larger, or more valuable audiences, at some point in the future. i dont really understand when the war 'stops', why the network audiences wont return to 'normal' levels... so that story doesnt really make sense. the alternative is a mkt share grab between the networks... does that explain the rush to ultra-nationalism? where the motivation is not to provide an accurate story, but to be at the edge of the other networks' stories, thereby getting the entire audience from just off-the-center, all the way to the extremities... a race to the bottom

for the record - i nearly exclusively watch the bbc. i usually find it more informative to view a story from a 3rd party perspective... and the beeb are much closer to an independent party than the US networks in this invasion. let me state outright that fox is evil - if u are watching fox, or know anyone who is, go and have a shower, and wash your hair, and get soap in your eyes - both as penance and to clean those evil thoughts and visions... i expect that the other networks are similar, cnn, abc, nbc... i dont have the internal fortitude to channel surf and compare the different networks to point out lies (and my remote doesnt work so welll). i dont consider for a minute that any of them offer any objective analysis. every story is colored, including those on the bbc. for me, its purely a matter of understanding the direction and the degree of the spin.

if anyone is reading this, and thinks that im stretching the truth about the impact of the different perspectives of the media, i beseech you to flip between fox and the bbc, to compare different versions of the same story... and note how the perspectives differ... note how the bbc will use words like 'allegedly', compared to what fox 'implies'. watch out for words that seem to carve a clintonesque position... and notice how they use derogatory/dismisssive statements regarding the peace movement as well, trying to invalidate/undermine it. i'm not sure what is 'real' and what isnt, but my point is that there are significant differences in the same 'truth', so we all need to be wary of what information we are being fed... all of it comes from a specific 'perspective'

i dont expect anyone to read this, and if there are any readers (hi), this is much more a personal diary than an instruction manual - im not trying to change anyones mind about anything (except maybe about being discerning when consuming any media). im not specifically trying to tell a story (dont tell me im not sufficiently representing the right-wing 'version' - this is just the bits that i find interesting for one reason or other), im not trying to be comprehensive (altho feel free to let me know if ive missed something that u think i might find interesting luke@lukeryland.com).