The Statue of Liberty

In the "debate" on immigration currently raging in the USA (and which is much more a populist diatribe to coddle the fearful and get their uninformed votes, especially in "Republican" circles), I would simply like to remind us all of Lady Liberty's position on that issue, as engraved on a bronze tablet there:

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

[Emma Lazarus: The New Colossus, 1903]

Do you want to close the golden door? Where does YOUR family originate from? Only North American Indians can claim "non-immigrant" status, so wake up everybody. The rest of us nearly successfully wiped out all the "natives". This is ONE world, people. Let it be one with liberty and justice for ALL!

At home together

Without the screws in his leg, Detti is back home and life is as it should be.
Time to visit Koko, even if it's too cold to bring him out, but I can't let Detlef walk around alone right now with his incision and screw holes still on the mend.
We are so very in love!

These photos are not allowed ...

A shameful prohibition of photos in the "restored" Tränenpalast, the infamous border-crossing at Friedrichstraße Station in Berlin, where the control procedures were everything from intimidating to demeaning and inhuman and "no photos" allowed, was something I would never have thought possible. So before the guard told me "photos forbidden", I had already photographed the old GDR sign "photos forbidden", the row of control cabins, one of which you were closed off in alone to be able to enter or depart the GDR, and the interior of one of them.

The explanation given, upon my complaint up front, was "copyright issues". Now, I'm asking who claims a copyright to GDR signs and control cabins? The personal mementos in showcases elsewhere were of no interest to me anyway, neither to look at nor to photograph; I only wanted to see that horror site without the horror guards who were once there. They have unfortunately been reincarnated under other auspices.

Shame on the organizers!