YES, I can...

2012 is a gift I welcome and am grateful for. Yes, I can enoy another twelve months of life; yes, I am well and confident, ever better, ever stronger; yes, I will speak up for all those everywhere who also need a chance, need support, need protection, need encouragement.
There is no turning back, no relinquishing what has been achieved, no doubt, no despair.
There is only hope and thought and love and ongoing life.

And with that, we can ensure freedom and rights for all everywhere...
the right to think, speak, love, and to be cured of illness.

Václav Havel - IN MEMORIAM

With the greatest of respect for this most honorable defender of human rights, I am deeply grieved that VÁCLAV HAVEL has died today. His voice and thoughts will be sorely missed in our age of increasing human rights with simultaneous increase of threats to precisely those rights. Let us all be vigilant to carry on the cause of one of the authors of CHARTER 77.

Let us all remember this man with deepest admiration and in deepest humility!

FREEDOM FOR LIU XIAOBO !

Yesterday was International Human Rights Day.
In Berlin, Nobel Literature Prize laureate Herta Müller joined in a demonstration at the Chinese Embassy for human rights and especially to free the Chinese author and Nobel Peace Prize winner LIU XIAOBO.
Also yesterday, Nobel Prize laureates around the world called for the release of LIU XIAOBO from the prison in China in which he has been held since 2009 for an eleven-year sentence. This call was made on the eve of the presentation of this years Nobel Prizes in Oslo and Stockholm.

Do not forget

LIU XIAOBO !

Free

LIU XIAOBO !

Freedom of expression and opinion, free access to information, freedom of speech is a fundamental human right. LIU XIAOBO's "crime" in China was to demand nothing more than this in the Charta '08 for the respect of the rights "guaranteed" in the Chinese constitution.

LIU XIAOBO

must be set free.

Liu Xiaobo's poem from prison:

Your Lifelong Prisoner

To Xia

My dear,
I'll never give up the struggle for freedom from the oppressors'
jail, but I'll be your willing prisoner for life.

I'm your lifelong prisoner, my love
I want to live in your dark insides
surviving on the dregs in your blood

inspired by the flow of your estrogen

I hear your constant heartbeat
drop by drop, like melted snow from a mountain stream
if I were a stubborn, million-year rock
you'd bore right through me
drop by drop
day and night

Inside you
I grope in the dark
and use the wine you've drunk
to write poems looking for you
I plead like a deaf man begging for sound
Let the dance of love intoxicate your body

I always feel
your lungs rise and fall when you smoke
in an amazing rhythm
you exhale my toxins
I inhale fresh air to nourish my soul

I'm your lifelong prisoner, my love
like a baby loath to be born
clinging to your warm uterus
you provide all my oxygen
all my serenity

A baby prisoner
in the depths of your being
unafraid of alcohol and nicotine
the poisons of your loneliness
I need your poisons
need them too much

Maybe as your prisoner
I'll never see the light of day
but I believe
darkness is my destiny
inside you
all is well

The glitter of the outside world
scares me
exhausts me
I focus on
your darkness –
simple and impenetrable

-Harvard University Press from No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems by Xiaobo Liu. Copyright © 2012 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Welcome to the Twenty-First Century !

I wish for more such fellow countrymen before the country of my birth sinks fully into the dark night of medieval ignorance and prejudice. Mr. Prayer-Perry should perhaps ask his god who gave him the right to demean and discriminate other fellow humans or to deny them the rights and privileges and duties he enjoys himself. He is not running a campaign for president, but a campaign for Ayatollah of America. Watch out, people, before they put you under a veil with stars and stripes and introduce a christaria reminiscent of the horrors one of the first great American authors, Nathaniel Hawthorne, described in The Scarlet Letter. I for one will always be in solidarity with all the Hester Prynnes everywhere!

Perry’s Anti-Gay Rights Focus Is Divisive Even to Staff

The New York Times, by RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr., Published: December 8, 2011

OKATIE, S.C. — Gov. Rick Perry of Texas’ hard turn the past two days on gay issues, in which he has suggested that gay rights are inconsistent with both American and Christian values, has generated enormous criticism from lesbian and gay organizations and some religious groups, and has even helped split Mr. Perry’s top campaign aides over a new ad.

In that campaign ad, released on Wednesday, Mr. Perry says “you don’t need to be in the pew every Sunday” to know it is wrong that gay men and lesbians openly serve in the military at a time when there is no organized prayer in public schools.       

A New Friend, New Caring

Siang Be, a new friend from my last brief stay in Station 51 due to a fever episode, is just beginning his battle against mantle-cell lymphoma and will have as much support and encouragement along the way as Detlef and I can possibly muster for him.
His wife Steffi will enjoy that support, too, and we will share all that those who have been down such a road are unique in being able to give to others just entering such uncharted territory.
There is a special solidarity possible among "patients"; a nod, a smile, a little shake of the head is enough between us, because we know this "dark cloud" from the inside, know therefore HOW MUCH LIGHT there is inside that supposed darkness.
Siang will be beginning his chemo today, and I am simply calling upon everyone who read's this to think of him and his wife - they are two REAL people! - and wish them strength and healing. They needn't know you; you needn't know them: just send positive vibrations into room 13 of Station 51 of RVK so that he can achieve the cure I have achieved due to the successful beginning of my fight in precisely that same Station!
YOU CAN BEAT THIS, SIANG! HANG IN THERE, STEFFI! WE ARE THERE FOR BOTH OF YOU!