krix

Yes the house, but not the museum, which was designed by Renzo Piano.

I'm sorry, I seem to have overlooked the Chapel in your original post But it is a nice building so no harm in having it up here twice... (although my favorite building in Houston still is the Bank of America Building, followed by Pennzoil Place and the Williams Tower...)

Ah yes, he has designed almost all my favorite buildings in Houston .... But you forgot one important work of his though: And he was also such a complex character. On the one hand, in his youth he used to be a Nazi sympathizer who event went to Nazi Germany in the 30s, but after the war he regretted his support and even worked with the Israeli government (if I understand correctly, that had to do with the Bauhaus style, which is very prominent in Tel Aviv). Also, while he is idolized by many, I have also heard the claim that he was not so much a designer than a planner (that his personal work often lacked creative spirit). Of course I cannot judge this as a layperson. So my question to more knowledgeable people than me: what do you think of this (maybe not so much about the Nazi thing, because the question of how genuine his repentance was will have to remain subjective, but more about the artistic criticism...)

yeah that is definitely true, y'all have heard of the VW Beetle once driven by a certain Joseph Ratzinger, then sold to a German Zivi (conscientious objector to military service who has to serve in a so-called civilian substitute service), who didn't know of its previous owner until after the purchase. When Ratzinger became pope, he sold it on ebay for the nicety of 190,000

Yeah I would have liked to go to the AIA meeting, although I don't know of how much interest they would have been to architecturally interested lay people. Anyway, I hear the local chapter published an updated guidebook to San Antonio, which is nice because the old version I was able to purchase on my last visit does not include some of the newer buildings (naturally). Btw, does anyone know of any similar guidebook for Austin, or UT? I wasn't able to find anything like that on my previous visits there.

I wrote about party troopers from other parties such as the Communists and the Social Democrats actually having access to weapons. But after the Nazis came to power it quickly became clear to them that theirs was a doomed battle, so the Communists went into hiding and the Social Democrats became passive citizens of the new state. Anyway, also Poland was a military dictatorship before being occupied by Nazi Germany. You know, the first order in most dictatorships is to restrict the gun laws, so anybody not complying can simply be arrested as criminals. There were also isolated cases of resistance, the White Rose (nonviolent) or the group around Stauffenberg (violent) are but two examples. However, these were decried as criminals. I just don't see where the gun thing comes into play here. It is not so much about access to guns here, it is in my opinion more to do with the legal theory of positivism preventing too many people from taking up armed resistance. (Positivism in a nutshell states that laws have to be followed no matter their intent and the government has to be obeyed if it can legitimize itself through laws; and usually fascist regimes try to retain a semblance of legality). This doctrine has been superseded by legal scholars after WWII, this is why the East German border guards were convicted for shooting refugees at the inner-German border despite their actions being fully legal according to the East German laws, and this is why the German constitution now gives any citizen the right to take up armed resistance to protect the democratic order of the state.

Well in the Europe I know a lot of people actually prefer driving to large supermarkets outside the city centers (Main Street Europe is struggling too you know). I personally hated walking or biking to the grocery store (and European fridges might not be as humongous as in Texas, but they are not miniscule, families in Europe usually go grocery shopping once a week). Anyway, I know several grad students who survive without a car, most of them have a bike, but recently I met somebody who didn't even use a bike. He lived near Reliant, in walking distance to the light rail, and would go to campus riding the light rail. He also uses the light rail for grocery shopping, to the aforementioned Randall's in midtown....

Oh one more thing about the argument that gun laws contributed to the Holocaust.... I would really recommend reading up on your history. 1. the Weimar Republic was an era full of street fights between the troops of the Nazis, Communists and the Social Democrats, they were all armed. However, after Hitler's ascent to power, with the full state apparatus available to him, the Communists were either arrested or went into hiding, and the Social Democrats were left unharmed unless they didn't speak up. You know if you're a party trooper bent on taking over the state (which was true of the Nazis and the Communists), the last thing you cared about were the gun laws. 2. the great tragedy of the German Jews is that they had become assimilated to such an extent that they refused to believe that the German government would ever even consider killing them. The vast majority were law-abiding citizens, and many of them even war veterans of WWI, fervently patriotic. Thus until 1938, when it was relatively easy to leave the country, many refused to do so. The step by step approach taken by the government contributed to this I suppose. I mean they were deported to camps outside of Germany proper, and many of them followed the deportation orders voluntarily. 3. in the Ghettos in Poland, this was different, it was clearer what was going to happen to them, but as you might be aware, there was an armed uprising, you can read about it here. However, I don't know about gun laws in Poland and what kind of factor this might have played there. I do think that once you have become a fascist dictatorship the very notion of gun laws has become preposterous.

Yeah that's why I wrote "shootings" (and wasn't there some accident in Texas some 60 years ago that stands out as the school tragedy with most casualties, at least in the US? I think I read an article in Texas Monthly about it). Anyway, I think I agree with you that restricting gun laws wouldn't help much here. I don't really know what the right answer would be....

Just let me mention one less known fact: prior to the Virginia Tech shootings, the school shooting with the highest number of casalties was in Germany, the Erfurt massacre, a country with extensive gun-control laws (the perpretator mainly used a Glock 17). But if you compare statistics across the industrialized world, there still seems to be a trend that tighter gun laws lead to less victims in general (do not forget the victims from accidents involving guns, and also suicides). After all, in a country like Japan, where guns are even more restricted than in Germany, most school massacres are carried out with knives.

A friend of mine is a monk at the Chung Tai Zen Center of Houston (www.cthouston.org). It's on Bellaire, between Kirkwood and Cook. Although originally from Taiwan, they apparently offer a variety of classes in English. I'm not to sure as to the atmosphere since I'm only a Buddhist by heritage, but whenever I discuss issues of politics and religion with my friend he has been very open-minded about these things.

Just for fun, here are the names used in the German soccer Bundesliga: * Alemannia Aachen: Alemannia, one of the Latin names for Germany, compare French Allemagne, Spanish Alemania * DSC Arminia Bielefeld: DSC: German Sports Club, Arminius defeated the Romans in 9 AD. * TSV Bayer 04 Leverkusen: TSV: Gymnastics and Game Club, Bayer refers to the company which founded it, in 1904 * FC Bayern M

Well I know that it is meant to reference the energy industry (amongst other things), but here is a list of prominent soccer clubs that are called Dynamo, taken from the wikipedia site: * Romania Dinamo Bucharest * Czech Republic Dynamo Česk

Just one take on the naming debate I haven't read anywhere yet: Lokomotive Leipzig, Dynamo Dresden, Turbine Potsdam, Red Star Belgrade, these are all perfect names for socialist clubs. So instead of a name invoking the founding of Houston and the battle of San Jacinto, you now get a socialist sounding name... I know the American soccer market isn't geared towards Europe, but at least somebody should have done their research ...

I went there some years ago, in Munich, with a medical student, who I kept asking questions over and over This was of course before all the controversy broke out.. it was big in Germany, since Gunther von Hagens is German. One thing was that he was using the professor title incorrectly and was actually convicted of "title abuse" (which might only be a crime in Germany or Austria for that matter LOL), but the bigger concern was that indeed not all the donors had volunteered their bodies, that indeed some of the bodies were provided by Kyrgyz and/or Chinese prisoners who had been executed. This was even a title topic of Spiegel, the biggest German news magazine. Of course von Hagens denied everything but there was definitely something fishy about it. Too bad the Chronicle did not mention this... So I can say that I saw it and didn't have to feel bad about going...