You don't have to read German to get the picture: the white sheep are kicking the black sheep out of the tidy country...Oh, no--no racist overtones intended--just the importance of creating 'security' (sicherheit), since, as some politicians would have you believe, foreigners clearly commit more crimes than the native born...Incidentally, one in five Swiss residents is a foreign national.
It's also a play on words, since schaffen, which here means 'to create', also sounds like the word for 'sheep' (schaf). But the tone is hardly playful, eh?
"Honte" means 'shame'...and so instead of reading "for more security," the defaced poster now reads "shame for more"...(for more information, here's a link to an article in today's IHT...)
Not to be an ostrich-poking-its-head-in-the-cheese, but lying down among wildflowers on a high meadow, the Lauterbrunnen valley thousands of feet below, cool breezes from the glaciers on a sunny summer day...if only postcard-views could erase the social cracks that beget political posters...
My wife and I went for a quick weekend-road-trip up to northern Arizona this past weekend. Yesterday afternoon, our feet were where you see them above--this shot taken 800 feet above the "Little Colorado River" gorge, a few miles east of where it flows into the Grand Canyon.
The Grand Canyon...Few places on the planet are so photographed...we are all familiar with the multihued cliffs, the mile-deep drop--yes, yes, it's a 'wonder of the world'...But there is simply nothing like standing on the edge of such an expanse of naked geology, peering down in to mineral time...
It was my wife's first time to the Canyon, and I hadn't been since the age of seven. It was a long way to go for a short weekend, for the crowded, cursory glance at the countless ridges and chasms--but there's always next time--more time to spend...on the uncrowded North Rim, we hope. The South Rim, even early on a Sunday morning in October, was CROWD-ED. May I never know what it's like to go in mid-summer. (Now, there's an interesting 'curse' to wish on an enemy: 'May you experience the Grand Canyon. In summer. On a weekend.)
This is Humphrey's Peak, the highest mountain in Arizona--over 12,000 feet, although since you're already at 8000 feet, the extinct volcano doesn't seem all that tall:
The meadows were frosty--21 degrees! A record-low for Flagstaff on that date...
And remember--objects in mirror are closer than they appear. 
And so the hills (and canyon-edges) in northern Arizona are alive right now...with fall color and frosty multilingual exhalations...
A thousand years ago, the hills and cliffs were alive with other 'foreign' tongues--the tongues of 'the disappeared' (Anasazi) and ''the ones who are no more" (Hohokam)--the indigenous cultures that built pueblos and cliff-villages such as this one:
Just off the freeway between Phoenix and Sedona--Montezuma Castle national monument. "Condos with a view" from a millenium ago. Prime farmland. Reliable water-source. Abandoned, most likely due to long-term climate-change.
And here, south of Sedona, just east of the mountain-mining-town of Jerome, the ruins of Tuzigoot national monument:
...not unlike a hilltop village of Provence or Tuscany...Archaeologists have found here remains of macaws from Central America!--carried carefully along trade routes across thousands of miles of jungle and mountainous desert, then bartered...and finally, scarlet feathers ceremonially buried. The average life-span of these pueblo inhabitants eight centuries ago: forty years.The hills were alive...for a short time...a long time ago.
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