Always good to hear from Pat Condell, one of the freest thinkers around!

I just read some of the death threats to Condell. I truly hope he watches his back. I enjoy how his mind works and it would be beyond tragic for him to be murdered like Theo Van Gogh.

FWIW, most of the posters sending threats would lose a game of checkers to my three year old, so I don't see them ever finding him in a rabbit warren like London.

Some are obviously Muslims, others are homophobes, or hate Brits; most are illiterate or can't compose a sentence without going into "text" mode. This particular pet peeve has made it painful to read, so I started to skim after awhile, so I couldn't tell you if anyone identified themselves as Jewish or Christian. I wish I could collect a nickle for every F-bomb on this page, I'd retire immediately. Here's the link; you have to admire his courage to continue with this amount of rancor being leveled at him.

http://www.patcondell.net/page4/page4.html

Dang, Pat Condell and I'm on a public 'puter with no sound. I'll catch it on Monday. (Sigh, got to get my own.) Amy, you've got me absolutely hooked on this guy.

Swear to God and telling the truth, I was looking for an excuse to link that thing about bombing TV networks in a comment here. It gets back to the pissing match I had with Norm a few days ago. I really wish I'd done a better job with that 3:33pm comment... Too many typos.

They used to say that one thing America was better at than anything else was making cars. They don't say that so often any more.

Then we were the best at making airplanes. We might still be, but competition is a little tougher. (Maybe the thrill of the hunt was diminished for us after we flew to the motherfucking moon with a seven-transistor computer.)

But the thing we still do better than any other nation is media. Our styles of exposition, persuasion and distraction are head-and-shoulders above anything from any other culture. All the others are pathetically derivative, because their cultures lack the essential frictions --sexual and otherwise-- which make our product so compelling. They're a car without a motor, they're a burger without the beef.

One thing that you often see at the center of our media product is a woman. Sometimes, she has an open blouse. Sometimes, she has an open mind. Either way, she spooks the shit out of Achmed....

When I was in college, we used to wonder what effect the Mary Tyler Moore show was having on the audience watching the TV in a community center in a small village in Africa. Presumably, it just confused them. ("Why is this woman displeased with her perfectly good knit hat?")

Nowadays our media streams are infinitely more diverse, but they're also much more intimate. Imagine how a typical TV cooking show from America would play in Riyadh... It would still be an irresistible example of how bright and cheerful life can be when you can move through the world freely. (I imagine a housewife in Saudi Arabia thinking "The middle-aged American woman hosting this program isn't especially powerful, wealthy, or well-known, but she still has a beautifully-equipped kitchen, and she chooses what to cook in it. And we see her going out alone, driving herself, in shirtsleeves, to buy her ingredients at a store where the men greet her with a smile...")

I've been watching a lot of televised Formula One sports car racing in recent weeks. Recently the coverage from Britain included a feature on a successful German driver who retired and opened a horse ranch. The feature was composed and scored like an episode of "Dallas"... As if Europe had no memory of equestrian traditions by which to frame the enterprise.

It seems no matter what we throw out into the world in terms of dramas, the rest of the world buys into it. No matter how obvious it is that their own witless cultural norms prevent them from actually experiencing the choices depicted in our media --whether it's JR Ewing or Sarah Palin-- they're taking it all very personally.

But if Achmed ever actually did bomb our television studios, we'd probably respond as if any other business were attacked... Garden supply store, canned goods distributor, whatever.

PS- Does anyone remember this?

At the time, there was some thought that foreign assailants had misunderstood a directive from terrorist leadership to attack "the american media".

Pat's a patriot and a hero. He is welcome to crash at my place any time. I would say more, but Pat said it all, really.

No more foreign energy !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh, yeah, I was right. He was great, as usual.

He's a good speaker -- forthright without being off-setting or scantimonious but not afraid to speak the truth. I'm so tired of people apologetically skirting around the truth, hinting at it without ever actually having the balls to come right out and say it. We need more people who speak this well having the balls to say what needs saying out loud.

That said, I too am worried for his safety. I wonder just how many infidel martyrs we're going to have to have before we wake up to the fact that political correctness is gonna kill us all.