Demand the impossible – sounds like the least we can do

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I’ve just come across this Guardian report about a free, five-day course at Goldsmith’s College in London on activism and radical politics. I commented on the piece, criticisng the piss-taking style in which it was written while also including an offer to help out with future courses or with spreading the idea elsewhere. Just in […]

Worse than “cock-ups and casualties” at Thomson Reuters

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I wrote this comment in response to a commentary piece by ex-colleague and current friend Paul Holmes about recent editorial changes being for the better at Thomson Reuters, despite the recent “cock-ups and casualties”. I disagreed. Patrick Chalmers • I have a great deal of respect for Paul Holmes as an ex-colleague and as a […]

Setting The People Free – a meeting with the author

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I was delighted to spend a couple of hours today talking democracy with John Dunn, emeritus Professor of Political Theory at King’s College, Cambridge. Professor Dunn wrote the excellent “Setting the People Free“, a book that helped me nail down my thinking on the evolution of “democracy” since the Ancient Greeks coined a term for […]

Food and land: base camps for community building

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I wrote this blog entry for Stir magazine, which has a kickstarter campaign underway to raise funds for printing offline versions of the wonderful work it does already online. Have a think about the stuff you usually fritter your money away on, petrol for the Porsche, a Lear jet flight to Monaco, private banking advice […]

The bloody realities of self publishing

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Self-publishing is a grind. Don’t kid yourself that you can just kiss off that bestseller, throw it up on line as an eBook or paperback then lay back and count the royalty cheques as they roll in, particularly if you forgot to put in the teen vampires chapter. Here in the grunt room at Fraudcast News, […]

Undercurrents – advice from the veterans of radical video activism

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7AbVs6_fwA&w=420&h=315] Paul O’Connor of Undercurrents gave an inspiring, enlightening and entertaining talk about the potential of radical video film-making at the Bristol Radical Film Festival 2012. This animated film is a neat depiction of the why in all this. It’s all about trying to break up the effects of corrupted government and their collusion […]

Activist Video training in Bristol’s Stokes Croft

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0bTIh5hqmo&w=420&h=315] I shot this brief, smartphone film this morning using a visionOntv video-making template, warming up for a day at the Bristol Radical Film Festival in Stokes Croft. This week-long event has a hoard of film treasures, meaning the 15 or so participants in today’s training workshop didn’t need any explanations about why our […]

Cover drive

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I’m just about to finalise the cover design for the paperback edition of Fraudcast News, so this is the last chance for any budding cover designers to have their say on what it looks like. Having tried various routes to regular graphic artists, I decided to have a go myself. All comments – constructive or […]