Sunday, April 19, 2009
Monday, April 13, 2009
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Friday, April 10, 2009
We were all born innocent
Here's an article from The Independant that sums up perfectly what I have always been thinking of any murderer and criminal.
Nobody's born evil. The world we grow up in made us who we become and there's always a way to reverse the process. That's why I'm utter against any idea of death penalty.
Johann Hari: The child who kills is the child who never had a chance
Everything we know tells us child killers are invariably victims of extreme abuse
Friday, 10 April 2009
I have met children who became killers several times in my life: in the warzones of the Congo and the Central African Republic, and in the grey Young Offenders' Institutes of Britain. When I read about the events that are alleged to have happened last weekend in South Yorkshire, I kept thinking about their small, paranoid eyes. Two brothers – aged ten and eleven – have been charged with torturing two other, younger kids. The victims had been hit with bricks, burned with cigarettes, and slashed with knives in a wild field.
We are a long way from knowing what happened in that field that afternoon, or who carried out these acts. The visceral temptation when any child faces such accusations is to brand them as inherently evil demons who should be locked up far from us for life. But the most famous case of child-on-child killing in British history – that of Mary Bell – shows us how flawed this initial reaction is.
In 1968, in the sagging streets of the poorest part of Newcastle, a ten-year-old girl strangled two toddlers – Martin Brown, and Brian Howe – to death. She then cut their bodies, and with her best friend, a mentally disabled 13-year-old, she left notes in a nursery saying: "We did murder Martain brown, fuckof you BAstArd." She was reflexively described in the press as a child who had been "born evil", a "monster" and "demon".
Now we know what happened to her to make her into such a child. Mary's mother, Betty Bell, was a severely disturbed alcoholic who had been sectioned at least once. She worked as a prostitute specialising in sado-masochism – whippings and stranglings. The first thing she said when Mary was placed into her arms after giving birth was: "Take the thing away from me!" She rejected her daughter and repeatedly tried to kill her by feeding her an overdose of sleeping tablets. But eventually, she did find a use for Mary. Once she turned four, she began to pimp her to paedophiles.
Mary never knew who her father was, but she suspected her mother had been inseminated by her own dad. Later in life, she asked her mother point blank if this was the case. She didn't deny it. Betty simply said quietly: "You are the devil's spawn."
When she was ten, Mary made friends with another girl who was being raped by a local paedophile. All they had known in their lives was violent abuse – and they began to act it out. Mary tried to cut off one of the boy's penises with a razor – a plain, crazed act of revenge for what she had experienced since she was a toddler.
Yet it is strangely comforting to see evil as a primordial external force, something alien that can be hunted down and confined to cages. It dodges the colder truth that I have learned from all the child-killers I have met: we all have the capacity for terrible cruelty and sadism, especially if we are subjected to horror ourselves. Which of us can be confident that, given such Mary Bell's childhood, we wouldn't have done something depraved?
Yet the trial of the two children who killed Jamie Bulger – and the websites trying to figure out where they are now, so they can be lynched – suggests we have barely progressed since then. Excellent works of investigative journalism like Blake Morrison's book As If have uncovered evidence that these children were subjected to violent and probably sexual abuse. We don't want to hear it. We want devils and demons and a black-and-white world that tells us: no, it couldn't have been you; this crime belongs to a different species.
These killings are not political parables. However much right-wingers want to make this a story about welfare dependency and left-wingers want to make it a story of brutal Thatcherite economics, these rare murders have happened in Britain at the same rate for over a century. They have to be understood at the personal, human level.
To understand and explain these cases is not to excuse, or justify. We are talking about the most terrible thing that can happen to a person: torture, and murder. The children who do this need to be humanely detained for as long as they are a danger. But everything we know about children who kill tells us they are invariably victims of extreme abuse themselves, deserving of compassion, not hysterical condemnation.
I have watched my friend Camilla Batmanghelidjh – the director of Kids Company – work with children in South London who have bricked, bottled and tortured other children. She explains: "Since the Bell and Bulger cases, we've learned a lot about how a developing brain reacts to abuse, but the judicial system hasn't caught up.
"We now know from brain scans that if you have really poor quality care in childhood, your pre-frontal lobes don't develop properly. Those are the parts of the brain that think rationally, empathise, and exercise self-control. It is physically impossible for these children to calm down and think a situation through. Their brains haven't developed that way."
So to treat them like morally responsible mini-adults who just made a bad decision – as the British courts do today – doesn't make sense. It is a neurological fiction.
When this impaired brain chemistry combines with violent abuse and rape, the children can become time-bombs. "They have been taught to see the world through one template: you're a victim, or you're an abuser. That's how they think human relationships work," Batmanghelidjh puts it. "At first, they are abused, and at some point they become determined to be a perpetrator, because then at least they have power and control. If you think those are your only two options in life, it seems preferable."
As she said this, I remembered the child soldiers in Central Africa who pointed guns into my face and smirked. Their families had been bayoneted in front of them, and they had buried the bodies themselves. In the warzones of the Congo, I met 11 and 12-year-old boys who had seen their mothers and sisters snatched away, and were then picked up by the militiamen and trained to rape and kill. Like Mary, they were re-enacting the violence they had experienced in a desperate attempt to switch roles: this time, they were the Big Men.
Children who kill are a question of mental health, not morality. They are internally destroyed children, not devils. Given the love and support that they deserve, such children can develop their frontal lobes and their capacity for empathy over time, and be released. As Gita Sereny's reportorial masterpiece Cries Unheard shows, Mary Bell eventually developed into a morally responsible adult and "a very, very loving mother" – albeit one perpetually haunted by the knowledge of what she had done.
Haven't we progressed enough since the Middle Ages to see these truths, and reject the barbaric theology of "evil" children?
When accusations like this bleed into the news, we need to stand at the front of the looming lynch mob and say: Stop. Think. In 1861, a leader in The Times commented on the trial of two eight-year-old boys in Stockport who had tortured and killed a toddler. It said: "Children of that age cannot be held legally accountable in the same way as adults. It is absurd and monstrous that these two children have been treated like murderers." Isn't it time we progressed to 1862?
Nobody's born evil. The world we grow up in made us who we become and there's always a way to reverse the process. That's why I'm utter against any idea of death penalty.
Johann Hari: The child who kills is the child who never had a chance
Everything we know tells us child killers are invariably victims of extreme abuse
Friday, 10 April 2009
I have met children who became killers several times in my life: in the warzones of the Congo and the Central African Republic, and in the grey Young Offenders' Institutes of Britain. When I read about the events that are alleged to have happened last weekend in South Yorkshire, I kept thinking about their small, paranoid eyes. Two brothers – aged ten and eleven – have been charged with torturing two other, younger kids. The victims had been hit with bricks, burned with cigarettes, and slashed with knives in a wild field.
We are a long way from knowing what happened in that field that afternoon, or who carried out these acts. The visceral temptation when any child faces such accusations is to brand them as inherently evil demons who should be locked up far from us for life. But the most famous case of child-on-child killing in British history – that of Mary Bell – shows us how flawed this initial reaction is.
In 1968, in the sagging streets of the poorest part of Newcastle, a ten-year-old girl strangled two toddlers – Martin Brown, and Brian Howe – to death. She then cut their bodies, and with her best friend, a mentally disabled 13-year-old, she left notes in a nursery saying: "We did murder Martain brown, fuckof you BAstArd." She was reflexively described in the press as a child who had been "born evil", a "monster" and "demon".
Now we know what happened to her to make her into such a child. Mary's mother, Betty Bell, was a severely disturbed alcoholic who had been sectioned at least once. She worked as a prostitute specialising in sado-masochism – whippings and stranglings. The first thing she said when Mary was placed into her arms after giving birth was: "Take the thing away from me!" She rejected her daughter and repeatedly tried to kill her by feeding her an overdose of sleeping tablets. But eventually, she did find a use for Mary. Once she turned four, she began to pimp her to paedophiles.
Mary never knew who her father was, but she suspected her mother had been inseminated by her own dad. Later in life, she asked her mother point blank if this was the case. She didn't deny it. Betty simply said quietly: "You are the devil's spawn."
When she was ten, Mary made friends with another girl who was being raped by a local paedophile. All they had known in their lives was violent abuse – and they began to act it out. Mary tried to cut off one of the boy's penises with a razor – a plain, crazed act of revenge for what she had experienced since she was a toddler.
Yet it is strangely comforting to see evil as a primordial external force, something alien that can be hunted down and confined to cages. It dodges the colder truth that I have learned from all the child-killers I have met: we all have the capacity for terrible cruelty and sadism, especially if we are subjected to horror ourselves. Which of us can be confident that, given such Mary Bell's childhood, we wouldn't have done something depraved?
Yet the trial of the two children who killed Jamie Bulger – and the websites trying to figure out where they are now, so they can be lynched – suggests we have barely progressed since then. Excellent works of investigative journalism like Blake Morrison's book As If have uncovered evidence that these children were subjected to violent and probably sexual abuse. We don't want to hear it. We want devils and demons and a black-and-white world that tells us: no, it couldn't have been you; this crime belongs to a different species.
These killings are not political parables. However much right-wingers want to make this a story about welfare dependency and left-wingers want to make it a story of brutal Thatcherite economics, these rare murders have happened in Britain at the same rate for over a century. They have to be understood at the personal, human level.
To understand and explain these cases is not to excuse, or justify. We are talking about the most terrible thing that can happen to a person: torture, and murder. The children who do this need to be humanely detained for as long as they are a danger. But everything we know about children who kill tells us they are invariably victims of extreme abuse themselves, deserving of compassion, not hysterical condemnation.
I have watched my friend Camilla Batmanghelidjh – the director of Kids Company – work with children in South London who have bricked, bottled and tortured other children. She explains: "Since the Bell and Bulger cases, we've learned a lot about how a developing brain reacts to abuse, but the judicial system hasn't caught up.
"We now know from brain scans that if you have really poor quality care in childhood, your pre-frontal lobes don't develop properly. Those are the parts of the brain that think rationally, empathise, and exercise self-control. It is physically impossible for these children to calm down and think a situation through. Their brains haven't developed that way."
So to treat them like morally responsible mini-adults who just made a bad decision – as the British courts do today – doesn't make sense. It is a neurological fiction.
When this impaired brain chemistry combines with violent abuse and rape, the children can become time-bombs. "They have been taught to see the world through one template: you're a victim, or you're an abuser. That's how they think human relationships work," Batmanghelidjh puts it. "At first, they are abused, and at some point they become determined to be a perpetrator, because then at least they have power and control. If you think those are your only two options in life, it seems preferable."
As she said this, I remembered the child soldiers in Central Africa who pointed guns into my face and smirked. Their families had been bayoneted in front of them, and they had buried the bodies themselves. In the warzones of the Congo, I met 11 and 12-year-old boys who had seen their mothers and sisters snatched away, and were then picked up by the militiamen and trained to rape and kill. Like Mary, they were re-enacting the violence they had experienced in a desperate attempt to switch roles: this time, they were the Big Men.
Children who kill are a question of mental health, not morality. They are internally destroyed children, not devils. Given the love and support that they deserve, such children can develop their frontal lobes and their capacity for empathy over time, and be released. As Gita Sereny's reportorial masterpiece Cries Unheard shows, Mary Bell eventually developed into a morally responsible adult and "a very, very loving mother" – albeit one perpetually haunted by the knowledge of what she had done.
Haven't we progressed enough since the Middle Ages to see these truths, and reject the barbaric theology of "evil" children?
When accusations like this bleed into the news, we need to stand at the front of the looming lynch mob and say: Stop. Think. In 1861, a leader in The Times commented on the trial of two eight-year-old boys in Stockport who had tortured and killed a toddler. It said: "Children of that age cannot be held legally accountable in the same way as adults. It is absurd and monstrous that these two children have been treated like murderers." Isn't it time we progressed to 1862?
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Merci Corbin!
C'est moi l'prem's! Et je prends celui de droite! ^^'
Les autres je m'en fous, z'en faites c'que vous voulez...
Can they be anymore pathetic?
Chelsea was facing Newcastle last Saturday.
And once again Chelsea players managed to come up with another apocaliptically stupid and the most lamest celebration ever!
It was like watching the guys from the Big Bang Theory. A bunch of absolute hopeless nerds who do things nobody gets and think it's funny.
And once again Chelsea players managed to come up with another apocaliptically stupid and the most lamest celebration ever!
It was like watching the guys from the Big Bang Theory. A bunch of absolute hopeless nerds who do things nobody gets and think it's funny.
As you can see, Lampard's checking Malouda's hair for lice. Ha...ha...ha...
Who knew Chelsea players could reverse evolution? -_-'
Who knew Chelsea players could reverse evolution? -_-'
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Sunday, April 05, 2009
Saturday, April 04, 2009
Jeepers creepers scottish style!
That’s absolutely amazing news from Scotland. It might sound silly for those who don’t follow football but there was a bit of a scandal on the demeanor of Barry Ferguson and Allan McGregor. The first is captain and the second is goalie for Scotland’s team and the Glasgow Rangers.
Well after Scotland lost against…who knows, it’s Scotland! last Sunday, the pair thought it could be fun to go for some good session of drinking binge in their hotel although they had to play Iceland on the next Wednesday. So after that bollocky session, the manager gave them a right rollocking and they were suspended from that game and had to stay on the bench.
Already, this is amazing. Because England is now supposed to have a very strict manager who’s Italian so whose idea of discipline comes right form the “Little Manual of Fascism” by a man called Benito Mussolini. But as a true Italian when it comes to actually do more than talking they turned out like a big balloon full of hot air. It’s huge, you can’t see anything else, it looks brilliant but it’s empty and wobbles with the wind.
In England, the wind was John Terry, the captain of Chelsea and England, and Ashley Cole going out for some lapdancers (despite married. And father of twins for Terry) and flows of booze. An evening that ended up with Cole profusely insulting a police man. Two days later, Wayne Rooney, once again, was acting like a little spoilt bat-faced brat and was getting sent off in a crucial game for Man Utd after two yellow cards in less than 20 minutes.
Well in England, they got slapped on the wrists and it was a really big deal for everyone. The manager was showing (off) that he would not joke about it. The next Beckham came and once again told us to leave the poor players alone because if we tried to tame them to much they would stop playing so well. So well that England hasn’t won anything since 1966 and never went beyond the quarter finals with Beckham as a captain!
David The Eighth World Wonder Beckham is not full of hot air, just fart air!
And that was it. The big boss told them: “You’re a bad boy” but no more because England need them, you know…
Meanwhile, Scotland needs Ferguson and McWhatever yet the manager dropped them and they ended up on the bench…giving the finger and doing V-sign (which is like a finger in the British Islands) to everyone from the bench: their team, the manager, the opposite team.
Barry Ferguson giving the V-sign
They thought they were so clever! You can easily the level of smugness and self-satisfaction of their faces. You can almost imagine how proud they were when they came back to the locker rooms and bragged about their very mature gestures with their team mates.
Well, yesterday, after two days of pictures and footages everywhere on the Scottish papers and tellies, the biggest anger from the fans Scotland ever knew, the pair got dropped…forever!! They will never ever have the right to play for Scotland again in their whole life!
And when it comes to their clubs, when they both showed up for training, they were sent back home right away. Fergusson was stripped from his club captaincy, they were both suspended for two weeks and will lost their salary for the next three weeks. The Rangers will give them to charity.
And now it is announced that the club can’t wait to get rid of them in the transfer window in summer.
Here are the directions to throw a very promising brilliant career down the gutter in less than a week. They both went from stars and key players for Glasgow and Scotland to nothing at all!
Suddenly, Il Duce Capello’s so-called tough love methods look utterly pathetic!
Well after Scotland lost against…who knows, it’s Scotland! last Sunday, the pair thought it could be fun to go for some good session of drinking binge in their hotel although they had to play Iceland on the next Wednesday. So after that bollocky session, the manager gave them a right rollocking and they were suspended from that game and had to stay on the bench.
Already, this is amazing. Because England is now supposed to have a very strict manager who’s Italian so whose idea of discipline comes right form the “Little Manual of Fascism” by a man called Benito Mussolini. But as a true Italian when it comes to actually do more than talking they turned out like a big balloon full of hot air. It’s huge, you can’t see anything else, it looks brilliant but it’s empty and wobbles with the wind.
In England, the wind was John Terry, the captain of Chelsea and England, and Ashley Cole going out for some lapdancers (despite married. And father of twins for Terry) and flows of booze. An evening that ended up with Cole profusely insulting a police man. Two days later, Wayne Rooney, once again, was acting like a little spoilt bat-faced brat and was getting sent off in a crucial game for Man Utd after two yellow cards in less than 20 minutes.
Well in England, they got slapped on the wrists and it was a really big deal for everyone. The manager was showing (off) that he would not joke about it. The next Beckham came and once again told us to leave the poor players alone because if we tried to tame them to much they would stop playing so well. So well that England hasn’t won anything since 1966 and never went beyond the quarter finals with Beckham as a captain!
David The Eighth World Wonder Beckham is not full of hot air, just fart air!
And that was it. The big boss told them: “You’re a bad boy” but no more because England need them, you know…
Meanwhile, Scotland needs Ferguson and McWhatever yet the manager dropped them and they ended up on the bench…giving the finger and doing V-sign (which is like a finger in the British Islands) to everyone from the bench: their team, the manager, the opposite team.
Barry Ferguson giving the V-sign
They thought they were so clever! You can easily the level of smugness and self-satisfaction of their faces. You can almost imagine how proud they were when they came back to the locker rooms and bragged about their very mature gestures with their team mates.
Well, yesterday, after two days of pictures and footages everywhere on the Scottish papers and tellies, the biggest anger from the fans Scotland ever knew, the pair got dropped…forever!! They will never ever have the right to play for Scotland again in their whole life!
And when it comes to their clubs, when they both showed up for training, they were sent back home right away. Fergusson was stripped from his club captaincy, they were both suspended for two weeks and will lost their salary for the next three weeks. The Rangers will give them to charity.
And now it is announced that the club can’t wait to get rid of them in the transfer window in summer.
Here are the directions to throw a very promising brilliant career down the gutter in less than a week. They both went from stars and key players for Glasgow and Scotland to nothing at all!
Suddenly, Il Duce Capello’s so-called tough love methods look utterly pathetic!
Friday, April 03, 2009
Jules is discovering the marvel of Photoshop
I just got Photoshop and I'm just at the very very very!! begining.
Yet, you know me...I found how to reduce the curves and increase the muscles on my lovely ballers straight away. Well...gay away! ^^'
Yet, you know me...I found how to reduce the curves and increase the muscles on my lovely ballers straight away. Well...gay away! ^^'
I desperately need Céline to explain me how to use that thing. I'm completely lost! :-/
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