I just returned from California where many of my friends are involved with the fight against Prop 8, a proposed amendment to the Californian Constitution that would eliminate the rights of same-sex couples to marry. Inserting inequality into the Californian Constitution is not my idea of a good way to protect human rights for all and I would personally not want to get married knowing that same-sex couples don’t have the same rights as me. Check out these PSAs encouraging…

This is rather old news but I love this quote from Madeleine Albright after Sarah Palin misquoted her earlier this month: “Though I am flattered that Governor Palin has chosen to cite me as a source of wisdom, what I said had nothing to do with politics. This is yet another example of McCain and Palin distorting the truth, and all the more reason to remember that this campaign is not about gender, it is about which candidate has an…

Well, well, well it seems Christopher Buckley (son of William F. Buckley) and Christopher Hitchens are voting for Obama. Christopher Buckley: Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance. Read Buckley in Tina Brown’s new online publication The Daily Beast. Christopher Hitchens (is it wrong to admit that I have a weird guilty crush on Hitch?):…

Another great polemic from Giles Bolton’s book Africa Doesn’t Matter (The UK version is called Aid and Other Dirty Business). Here he focuses on the problems with trade (where current tariffs and subsidies screw both people in Africa and taxpayers/consumers in the West): If the major problem with aid is that the West isn’t doing enough for Africa, the problem with trade seems to be that the West is doing little at all for the world’s poorest continent. We explicitly…

Because this one for Passchendaele is terrible:

Every now and then I find it impossible to keep this blog film-focused. There is too much else happening in the world. Today is one of those days because I am reading an eye-opening book by Giles Bolton (my copy is called Aid And Other Dirty Business but in the US it is called Africa Doesn’t Matter) – it is a brilliant investigation into why Africa is still so poor and why aid often doesn’t do the good that we…

Sorry for protracted blogging silence. Like last year, I disappeared after BRITDOC into the rural wilderness of South Africa (with a little urban time in my birth city of Joburg too). It was strange how fast the chaos of my working life dropped away and felt so far away. I started to think I had made up Shooting People and BRITDOC and the world of docs and independent film in general. In a weird double-move it all felt very irrelevant…

I may be over-tired and over-sentimental but this video does make me grin like a fool. Just like Boing Boing said it would! Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

From XKCD.