ZAC EFRON
IS THE NEXT
HASSELHOFF
IS THE NEXT
HASSELHOFF
that is all..
November 19, 2007
November 10, 2007
oh baby won't you cry?
By David M. Crane
Friday, November 9, 2007
International Herald Tribune
SYRACUSE, New York:
It was a clear hot day. The meeting hall in the school for the
deaf located up-country near Makeni rippled with the heat of
over 500 persons. The meeting was one of many I conducted
throughout Sierra Leone to provide a vehicle for people to talk
about the war, the crimes, their pain and other issues related to our work. As I finished answering one question, a small arm
was raised in the middle of the hall. I walked back to the
student. He meekly stood up, head bowed, and mumbled loud
enough for those around him to hear, "I killed people, I am
sorry, I did not mean it." I went over to him, tears in my eyes,
hugged him and said, "Of course you didn't mean it. I forgive
you."
This exchange took place while I was in Sierra Leone as chief prosecutor of the international war crimes tribunal in West
Africa, the Special Court for Sierra Leone.
The young man was one of tens of thousands of children who
had been forced into combat against their will. I chose not to
prosecute any of them for the crimes they committed. It would
have been legally and morally wrong to do so.
Only in the past 10 years has the international community begun to grapple with this scourge. A report to the United Nations
secretary general in 1996 laid out a comprehensive program to
protect children during times of armed conflict. The introduction declared:
"More and more of the world is being sucked into a desolate
moral vacuum. This is a space devoid of the most basic human values; a space in which children are slaughtered, raped and maimed; a space in which children are exploited as soldiers;
a space in which children are starved and exposed to extreme brutality. . . There are few further depths to which humanity can sink."
A child soldier named Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen, is about to be tried before the ad hoc military commission in
Guant?amo. He is charged with the killing of an American
soldier during a firefight in which Khadr himself was seriously
wounded. He was 15 at the time. Now, at the age of 20, after
years in detention as an "unlawful enemy combatant," Khadr is being tried for what he did as a child.
The use of children in warfare is not a new phenomenon.
Children have followed armies for centuries as support
personnel - pages, water carriers, drummers. In European
navies, boys were assigned to warships by noble parents to
embark on careers as officers; others were pressed into duty
as sailors.
With the advent of the various Hague rules governing weapons
in war in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the rules of
warfare began to take on a universal status. With the two World Wars, attention shifted from weapons to the status of
non-combatants.
The founding of the United Nations in 1945 established a voice
for civilians in time of warfare, particularly for children. The
Geneva Conventions of 1949 were devoted to persons who are "out of the combat" - prisoners of war, the shipwrecked,
civilians. Children finally gained special protected under
international law.
However, the Cold War also saw the rise of Third-World
conflict, in which children were once again the victims. In the
1970s, the Geneva Conventions were revised to reflect the
realities of modern armed conflict. Once again the bar was
raised, and most states agreed to the new standards.
The protocols of 1977 specifically prohibited the use of children in armed conflict. Using children in conflict was not specifically defined as a crime, but the implication was this was a grave
breach of the Geneva Conventions.
The subsequent Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) of 1990 was more specific about the use of children in armed
conflict. By this time, the act of child recruitment as a crime had crystallized into international law.
The convention defines children as those below the age of 18, and among other things, it requires states to establish a
minimum age at which criminal responsibility may be assigned. An optional protocol admonishes armed groups - as distinct
from armed forces of the state - not to recruit or use children
under any circumstances.
The detention of juveniles is also covered by international
agreements. Juvenile offenders, like adult offenders, are to be
awarded prompt due process. A child has the right to timely
access to legal counsel, and the right to timely review of their
detention. Detention should only be used as a last resort, in
exceptional circumstances and for the shortest possible
duration. In detention, juveniles must be separated from adults.
Despite the political and legal recognition that child recruitment
is a universal crime, child recruitment has continued unabated. In 1996, the Marcel Report stunned the United Nations,
highlighting the full extent of the problem. Millions of children
died in the 1980s and 1990s. There were calls for action and a
plan began to evolve to monitor the recruitment of child soldiers.
In the late 1990s the world once again sat down and began to
develop a mechanism to prosecute war crimes and crimes
against humanity. The Rome Statute, which created the
International Criminal Court, specifically stated that the
recruitment of children under the age of 15 is a "serious
violation of international humanitarian law."
Yet the tragedy continues worldwide, particularly in Africa.
Forty-two armed groups in 11 countries were specifically
singled out in a UN report issued in February 2005. It called for monitoring and reporting of children in armed conflict to ensure
that the law is complied with worldwide.
Introducing a witness before the international tribunal in West
Africa, I described another tragedy in Sierra Leone's 10-year
tale of horror, this one from the Kono district:
"The rebels took his younger brother and himself to Kaiama
along with 13 other boys. The rebels lined the 15 children up
and offered them a choice: Join one line if they wanted to be a
rebel, another line if they wanted to be freed and allowed to go home. All 15 of these boys, and they were just boys, joined the line for freedom.
"It was the wrong choice. They were accused of sabotage to
the revolution. To keep them from escaping, each was held
down, screaming, and one by one had AFRC and/or RUF
carved into their chests with the blade of a sword. The witness was now just marked property and treated as such. He will be
in this very chamber to tell his horror story and show you his
scarred chest that to this very day bears the letters:
A-F-R-C R-U-F."
Omar Khadr, a 15-year-old Canadian, could have been that
child in Sierra Leone, but he was in Afghanistan, in similar
circumstances, not of his making, not under his control, in an
environment from which as a child there was no escape.
Legally, morally and politically the international community -
including the United States - has separated children from the
horrors of combat, to protect and nurture, to rehabilitate and
support; not to punish.
No child found in combat should be held liable for his or her
acts. That is the legal standard of the world community and of
this country. What will take place in Guant?amo in the coming weeks is wrong.
David M. Crane, professor of practice at the Syracuse University College of Law, was the prosecutor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone from 2002 to 2005.
Friday, November 9, 2007
International Herald Tribune
SYRACUSE, New York:
It was a clear hot day. The meeting hall in the school for the
deaf located up-country near Makeni rippled with the heat of
over 500 persons. The meeting was one of many I conducted
throughout Sierra Leone to provide a vehicle for people to talk
about the war, the crimes, their pain and other issues related to our work. As I finished answering one question, a small arm
was raised in the middle of the hall. I walked back to the
student. He meekly stood up, head bowed, and mumbled loud
enough for those around him to hear, "I killed people, I am
sorry, I did not mean it." I went over to him, tears in my eyes,
hugged him and said, "Of course you didn't mean it. I forgive
you."
This exchange took place while I was in Sierra Leone as chief prosecutor of the international war crimes tribunal in West
Africa, the Special Court for Sierra Leone.
The young man was one of tens of thousands of children who
had been forced into combat against their will. I chose not to
prosecute any of them for the crimes they committed. It would
have been legally and morally wrong to do so.
Only in the past 10 years has the international community begun to grapple with this scourge. A report to the United Nations
secretary general in 1996 laid out a comprehensive program to
protect children during times of armed conflict. The introduction declared:
"More and more of the world is being sucked into a desolate
moral vacuum. This is a space devoid of the most basic human values; a space in which children are slaughtered, raped and maimed; a space in which children are exploited as soldiers;
a space in which children are starved and exposed to extreme brutality. . . There are few further depths to which humanity can sink."
A child soldier named Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen, is about to be tried before the ad hoc military commission in
Guant?amo. He is charged with the killing of an American
soldier during a firefight in which Khadr himself was seriously
wounded. He was 15 at the time. Now, at the age of 20, after
years in detention as an "unlawful enemy combatant," Khadr is being tried for what he did as a child.
The use of children in warfare is not a new phenomenon.
Children have followed armies for centuries as support
personnel - pages, water carriers, drummers. In European
navies, boys were assigned to warships by noble parents to
embark on careers as officers; others were pressed into duty
as sailors.
With the advent of the various Hague rules governing weapons
in war in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the rules of
warfare began to take on a universal status. With the two World Wars, attention shifted from weapons to the status of
non-combatants.
The founding of the United Nations in 1945 established a voice
for civilians in time of warfare, particularly for children. The
Geneva Conventions of 1949 were devoted to persons who are "out of the combat" - prisoners of war, the shipwrecked,
civilians. Children finally gained special protected under
international law.
However, the Cold War also saw the rise of Third-World
conflict, in which children were once again the victims. In the
1970s, the Geneva Conventions were revised to reflect the
realities of modern armed conflict. Once again the bar was
raised, and most states agreed to the new standards.
The protocols of 1977 specifically prohibited the use of children in armed conflict. Using children in conflict was not specifically defined as a crime, but the implication was this was a grave
breach of the Geneva Conventions.
The subsequent Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) of 1990 was more specific about the use of children in armed
conflict. By this time, the act of child recruitment as a crime had crystallized into international law.
The convention defines children as those below the age of 18, and among other things, it requires states to establish a
minimum age at which criminal responsibility may be assigned. An optional protocol admonishes armed groups - as distinct
from armed forces of the state - not to recruit or use children
under any circumstances.
The detention of juveniles is also covered by international
agreements. Juvenile offenders, like adult offenders, are to be
awarded prompt due process. A child has the right to timely
access to legal counsel, and the right to timely review of their
detention. Detention should only be used as a last resort, in
exceptional circumstances and for the shortest possible
duration. In detention, juveniles must be separated from adults.
Despite the political and legal recognition that child recruitment
is a universal crime, child recruitment has continued unabated. In 1996, the Marcel Report stunned the United Nations,
highlighting the full extent of the problem. Millions of children
died in the 1980s and 1990s. There were calls for action and a
plan began to evolve to monitor the recruitment of child soldiers.
In the late 1990s the world once again sat down and began to
develop a mechanism to prosecute war crimes and crimes
against humanity. The Rome Statute, which created the
International Criminal Court, specifically stated that the
recruitment of children under the age of 15 is a "serious
violation of international humanitarian law."
Yet the tragedy continues worldwide, particularly in Africa.
Forty-two armed groups in 11 countries were specifically
singled out in a UN report issued in February 2005. It called for monitoring and reporting of children in armed conflict to ensure
that the law is complied with worldwide.
Introducing a witness before the international tribunal in West
Africa, I described another tragedy in Sierra Leone's 10-year
tale of horror, this one from the Kono district:
"The rebels took his younger brother and himself to Kaiama
along with 13 other boys. The rebels lined the 15 children up
and offered them a choice: Join one line if they wanted to be a
rebel, another line if they wanted to be freed and allowed to go home. All 15 of these boys, and they were just boys, joined the line for freedom.
"It was the wrong choice. They were accused of sabotage to
the revolution. To keep them from escaping, each was held
down, screaming, and one by one had AFRC and/or RUF
carved into their chests with the blade of a sword. The witness was now just marked property and treated as such. He will be
in this very chamber to tell his horror story and show you his
scarred chest that to this very day bears the letters:
A-F-R-C R-U-F."
Omar Khadr, a 15-year-old Canadian, could have been that
child in Sierra Leone, but he was in Afghanistan, in similar
circumstances, not of his making, not under his control, in an
environment from which as a child there was no escape.
Legally, morally and politically the international community -
including the United States - has separated children from the
horrors of combat, to protect and nurture, to rehabilitate and
support; not to punish.
No child found in combat should be held liable for his or her
acts. That is the legal standard of the world community and of
this country. What will take place in Guant?amo in the coming weeks is wrong.
David M. Crane, professor of practice at the Syracuse University College of Law, was the prosecutor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone from 2002 to 2005.
October 21, 2007
take all you know and call it quits.
don't you love it?
the feeling of stirring. of change. of wanting more.
moving and pushing you for something higher.
then you wake up, make a cup of coffee, forget it all and get on with life...
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September 16, 2007
if i'm just bad news then you're a liar.
Before:
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After:
my room has been kurt-gallerified..
See, change can be a good thing.
Sometimes the fear of not knowing defeats the hope of moving on.
Sometimes the hurt of the once-was consumes the hope of the to-be.
Sometimes the pain of the no-more outweighs the hope of to-come.
But hope should always ALWAYS overcome;
hope should always conquer;
hope should win.
For as long as we still have hope, we know that we're alive.
And while there is hope, change is both possible and necessary.
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and my wall is an explosion of color..
July 24, 2007
i am a walking social norm violation.
just coz i don't like the quietness for too long...
i have nothing to say really.
other than: i'm gonna stick it to the man by getting fat.
that is all...
...almost. check out crazy for cult. fun fun for everyone.. well probably not everyone.
oh and is anyone looking for a cheap car? we're getting rid of Little Man *tears*
June 22, 2007
the world is an unfriendly place.
So I pretty much have the gayest haircut in all of central auckland. Perhaps even greater auckland, I dunno, I'm not travelled enough to know.
I just had my third/second-to-last exam on writing and culture. My hand hurts from writing about Myspace and the multiple, fragmentated, decentralized 'self' for two hours. (I hope I did at least, I can never tell if I managed to write what I was meaning to write after an exam). Well... 1.5 hours really, .5 hours was spent 'planning,' scribbling, picking at my chipped nail polish, drumming on the desk annoying people around me, deciding how to make use of the next 1.5 hours, and mentally portioning my water so it would last me the two hours (not that it worked... I started to feel the effects of nature about 20 minutes into the exam, the last 100 minutes were sheer torture), and then looking around to see if other people had started writing yet - they had, so i panicked and started writing too.
I now have about 12 hours to study 10 chapters for my next exam, which I haven't even touched yet. I'm wondering why it didn't cross my mind to break up the 10 chapters over the past 4 days of doing nothing. That's not true, what have I been doing the last few days? Important things I think... such as planning the next 4 years of my life. Yup. I have the next 4 years of my life mapped out. I think. That's only coz I realized I will be studying for another 4 years... Minimum. I think. Let's say 'I think' just once more for good measure. I think. Pondering this is eating into my 12 hours.. but I can't seem to sit still without tapping or spasming... I guess that's the triple shot mocha kicking in.
12 hours. 10 chapters. So what is that... like 1 hour and 12 minutes on each chapter? Maths was never my best subject. Right, getting on it.
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In the mean time, check out the Vatican's 10 Commandments for drivers. Keeping people on the 'road to salvation' - pretty serious business that.
Getting on it...
1. You shall not kill.
2. The road shall be for you a means of communion between people and not of mortal harm.
3. Courtesy, uprightness and prudence will help you deal with unforeseen events.
4. Be charitable and help your neighbor in need, especially victims of accidents.
5. Cars shall not be for you an expression of power and domination, and an occasion of sin.
6. Charitably convince the young and not so young not to drive when they are not in a fitting condition to do so.
7. Support the families of accident victims.
8. Bring guilty motorists and their victims together, at the appropriate time, so that they can undergo the liberating experience of forgiveness.
9. On the road, protect the more vulnerable party.
10. Feel responsible toward others.
June 11, 2007
400 years of silence is a long time.
I don't have any good original thoughts, so I'm just gonna keep stealing other's...
'We yearn for God's presence. We call to him. We scream at him. And we hear nothing. He answers our longings with silence. Sometimes his silence is unbearable[...]
These words were found scrawled on the wall of a concentration camp:I believe in the sun, even though it doesn't shine,
I believe in love, even when it isn't shown,
I believe in God, even when he doesn't speak.
God's silence offers us the choice--faith or sight. We can either abandon our faith or learn to trust in the dark. God leaves that choice up to us. And all the while he's more interested in our faith in him than our ability to decipher his silences. The poet Coleman Barks wrote,
"The only way we know the play of destiny and free will is to
dance the mystery and die inside it."
Jesus, Job, David, and that man in the concentration camp danced the mystery. '
-Steven James in Story - recapture the mystery.
June 04, 2007
death is the final enemy.
"I am at an impasse, and you, O God, have brought me here. From my earliest days, I heard of you. From my earliest days, I believed in you. I shared in the life of your people: in their prayers, in their work, in their songs, in their listening for your speech and in their watching for your presence. For me your yoke was easy. On me your presence smiled.
Noon has darkened. As fast as she could say, "He's dead," the light dimmed. And where are you in this darkness? I learned to spy you in the light. Here in this darkness I cannot find you. If I had never looked for you, or looked but never found, I would not feel this pain of your absence. Or is it not your absence in which I dwell but your elusive troubling presence?
Will my eyes adjust to this darkness? Will I find you in the dark--not in the streaks of light which remain, but in the darkness? Has anyone ever found you there? Did they love what they saw? Did they see love? And are there songs for singing when the light has gone dim? The songs I learned were all of praise and thanksgiving and repentance. Or in the dark, is it best to wait in silence?"
-Nicholas Wolterstorff in Lament for a Son.
take till there's nothing left.
Christians are weird creatures.
What a weird bunch we are.
I'm not sure that I would listen to me if I wasn't a Christian...
or if I wasn't me. (yes please).
I'm not sure that I would listen to me if I wasn't a Christian...
or if I wasn't me. (yes please).
Spot the non-christian. [Hint: they're the ones that don't have their hands raised]
So while I'm feeling cynical and despondent, here you go guys. (I don't know where this is from.. I think somone at Masters gave it to me..)
10 STEPS OF FAKING SPIRITUALITY TO IMPRESS A GIRL:
1. During worship, raise your hands in the air, tilt your head slightly
upwards at a 30-degree angle, and close your eyes. It might pay to sing as well.
If need be, practice in front of the mirror.2. Prophecy. Very spiritual. Ideally this would be in front of a whole
meeting, but just to a friend is fine, as long as the girl you are trying to
impress is watching. If you aren't actually a prophet, just read a nice psalm or
make something up that sounds appropriate.3. Tell her you aren't interested in girls right now because you only want to
serve God (could backfire).4. Be the first to go up for every 'serve God' altar-call, the last to leave,
and always shed a tear. Occasionally lie prostrate - weeping.5. When you know she is looking, go talk to that new lonely guy at the back.
6. During a slow worship song when she is within ear range, quietly say, in
an emotional voice, "Jesus, Jesus, O praise you Jesus, Praise you." Do not shed
a tear though. Tears are for special occasions, such as 'love you Lord,' 'Serve
you,' & 'repentance' altar-calls.7. Always take a long time with communion. Alternate each time between
sorrowful repentance and joyful celebration.8. Write notes and frequently consult your Bible during sermon. Don't worry,
you don't actually have to listen; write anything you want, however do chuck in
the odd reference. Once a month actually listen, and afterwards, when she is
within hearing range, discuss your thoughts on the sermon with a friend.9. Draw a line between spiritual and just plain weird. Do not:
- engage in flag dancing
- have spirit fingers
- randomly yell or scream
- fall over excessively. restrict yourself to 2 fall-overs a year, preferrably
at camp10. During worship, do what the song says. If it says to bow down, do so. If
it says to lift your hands, do so. Remember, faking spirituality is about being
genuine.
May 26, 2007
give my gun away when it's loaded.
aargh!we are not perfect.
this world is not perfect.
people are not perfect.
we are the first fruits...
BUT WE ARE NOT PERFECT!!
people hurt and experience things, and sometimes we may never know what others go through. can't we be okay with that? to say,
"hey, i'm sorry, i don't know what you're feeling and i have no idea what to say to you, but i will sit with you and hurt with you."
don't tell them it's all going to be fine.
don't tell them to brush it off.
don't tell them to be stronger.
let. them. hurt.
how can you say sorry in a language you have not learnt?
don't pretend to know.
don't pretend to be stronger.
don't pretend to have it all together.
and if you don't care, then don't pretend to care.
but most of all, don't pretend, no... don't EXPECT things to be perfect in this life.
"We are the fortunate ones, even with our broken hearts. We have so much. We are called to give it away." - Jamie Tworkowski
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