Today Golem.de informed about an interesting campaign initiated by a Bavarian professional journal about computer games. The magazine asks all gamers to write to their local delegates of the CSU (the governing party in Bavaria) that they won’t support their anti-computer games policy and therefore won’t vote for them in the upcoming elections. Politicians of the CSU have continued to ask for further restrictions concerning protection of minors.

I think the political discussion about “Killer games” is very unreasonable. Many of the people discussing never actually played those games. Germany already has the strongest laws for the protection of minors in Europe; I really wouldn’t want to see any more restrictions. So all you Bavarians out there, got to this page, participate, and show our local politicians, what you think!

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Media at 13:00 | Comment (1) | Trackback (1)

Shopping for some reading materials I discovered this book. The short synopsis said that Noam Chomsky would outline how badly the concept of neo-liberalism is influencing our world. So this book seemed to be a perfect addition to Gabor Steingart’s “World was on prosperity”. Noam Chomsky has a clear argumentation style and I easily finished the book within a day.

Chomsky is a well known critic of the American government, and so the book mainly centers on incidents related to American politics. I’m quite overwhelmed by the number of examples where U.S. American politics – under the cloak of free trade – manipulated the other for their own profit. “Their Profit” focuses here to profits of U.S. American investors. The neo liberalism seems to have a common thing with communism – there are always ways to manipulate the whole thing to give preferential treatment to selected people. In a democratic system like the one of the U.S. these people seem to be the sponsors of the parties. You could say well – someone has to profit why not those people who can achieve a lot of stuff (like those investors investing their money to help economies grow). But unluckily Chomsky is able to prove that the overall prosperity of economies is influenced negatively by such maneuvers. Therefore nothing is gained. Those investors are often preventing the economies they invest in to gain prosperity. Globalization opponents like ATAC surely love this book because of the huge amount of negative examples. I think globalization can still be something possible, but as long as there are people involved having their own agenda, it will be really difficult to find the most suitable way towards a world economy.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Media at 18:07 | Comment (1) | Trackback (1)

Once up on a time, there was a little student who was very active in working for the students’ council representatives, but then he had some disputes with his friends, and was no longer supported by his group. So it was decided to start a new group.

This is no fairy tale, but the background why Philipp an I had founded NUTS (NUTS is an acronym for “Neues Unabhängiges Team für Studierende” – which translates “New independent team for students”) back in 2003. Asking a few friends for their participation we managed to set up a list with six people running for the elections. And our Team was successful – we managed to gain the targeted seat at the Fachschaft SoWi. Unluckily we couldn't keep up our efforts, and after one and a half year NUTS was no longer needed.

So was the the web-page, and consequently I abandoned the related domain. But I archived the old Web-Site (formerly www.nuts-bamberg.de) here.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in university at 19:18 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Staying at the coke flat last week I already was able to see a rough cut of Lyssa’s interview with our Chancellor Angela Merkel – now it’s finally online at Xolo-tv. I really recommend you watching that video – in my opinion it displays a very authentic picture of our chancellor – much better than her own vlog.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Lost and Found at 17:31 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

The very interesting Blog on the election race by the ZDF shows it to me every day “Day X-4”, “Day X-3”, the elections come nearer and nearer. But somehow the Germans seem come down a peg or two once again. Obviously the situation is not bad enough for most of the people to be ready for some change. I found a quite interesting story about taxes at the Feki.de message board.
Also interesting, that my friend Jan Schmidt made it into the big news once more with his research on weblogs. Since political weblogs where quite a well discussed topic at the current election race. As you can see with my first statement, I belong to a minority – reading a blog about politics on a daily base.. I often wish people would care just a little more about politics in my home country. But I got the unwell feeling that our society simply gets to much into consuming and requesting, than really to think about what is necessary to achieve something. Performance is out! You might even become punished for performing too well – so why bother?
Sorry, that I don’t have time to go into the details this time. But since I’ll spend the weekend in Bangkok my schedule is quite tight right now..

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Daily Life at 05:43 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)