Hi there, you guys haven’t heard from me for a while. Now you might have thought that the system finally got me, but the truth is that this is only the state of affairs temporarily. In other words: the teaching practice takesquite a lot of time that I could have used on other projects. That does of course not mean that it’s not fun any more in any way.

And also, the silence here is somewhat of an exaggeration if you look at what I actually am able to get done. One of the things I did get done was to discuss the Muhammed picture case in Flensborg Avis (they do not let you find stories under one month old at their site). Now there are two reasons why I did it there: First of all it’s exactly NOT because I have any plans of ever going back to the wicked border area Germany/Denmark (where the paper is based), quite on the contrary: I know I can write stuff in that paper with a readership far far away from here without having to feel repercussions from my surroundings. Secondly, to a large extent I praised the Norwegian government’s handling of the case and asked for the resignation of the Danish prime minister for their extremely poor and confrontational imperialist-minded handling of it all. And what point is there in addressing a Norwegian audience telling them that they and their government are doing everything exactly right?

Another thing that has come up are the student parliament elections at the University of Oslo. This year I am myself not running as a top candidate as I feel that it’stime to move on to something different, but I am nevertheless still on the list of the Left Alliance and there is at least a theoretical chance that I might get voted in to some position or other anyways. And also, I feel we have been quite a number of peoplewho have been pushing the Left Alliance during the last year quite a bit, and I was quite happy to see that we actually managed to get recruits who will actually be active members of parliament this year as well. If you look further down on several of the lists at several faculties, it gets even more exiting: here you can find a broad selection of the far left of Oslo, completely across party lines.

My current contribution to it all are the two pages in the election information paper which is handed out along with the student newspaper this week (See: p. 1+2). While all the other parties concentrate on having pictures and names of themselves (OK, we have a few pictures too), we focus on two things: content in terms of political analysis (duh! this is not a beauty contest!) and content in terms of listing up what we actually have achieved during the last year. However, while our track record is quite something to be proud of (I think), I must admit that it is still mostly concentrating on writing and voting on resolution in a parliament with no real decision making power at all. it’s sort of a tiny version of the European parliament: a machine to hand out massive amounts of titles to the MPs, but when it comes to politics it is rather toothless!

This year even members of the conservative student organization recently suggested for the student parliament to be disbanded and replaced by direct elections of people to all the main positions.

But they are conservatives, so I’m doubtful of their ends. They have traditionally been those opposing common meetings for all students and favoring the parliamentary alternative. So before I hear the entire plan laid out, I’m not quite prepared to let them play Wagner while I walk out of the parliament after voting forwalk out of the Reichstag after voting for any enabling act.

But now I’m off to Bergen for the annual conference of the Norwegian Students Union (NSU) which will conclude my inner-Norwegian travels for now…