I, too, enjoyed the time spent on the River Walk in San Antonio. I remember it more vividly than the Alamo. Ms. McClean makes a good point. Other than Ol' Sac, we seem to be trying to hide our rivers rather than making them a focal point of city planning. Interesting article & thanks to the people who shared their answers to an excellent question.

I've never been convinced that Shockley was a "racist". He was first & foremost an applied scientist/engineer. Like Einstein, his politics were oddball, perhaps naive, and he could be far left on one issue & far right on the next. His notion that human genetics should be centrally planned to enhance the intelligence of the species through the generations by applying scientific principles had been the central theme of the popular novel "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley. In that novel, humans were supposedly happier precisely because they were pre-programmed genetically prior to birth so that they would love the jobs they would ultimately end up doing for their whole lives. They wouldn't have to waste time trying to "find" themselves or their ultimate purpose/contribution in the world. "Although Shockley was concerned about both black and white dysgenic effects, he found the situation among blacks more disastrous. While unskilled whites had 3.7 children on average versus an average of 2.3 children for skilled whites, Shockley found from the 1970 Census Bureau reports that unskilled blacks had 5.4 children versus 1.9 for the skilled blacks. Shockley reasoned that because intelligence (like most traits) is inherited, the black population would, over time, become much less intelligent countering all the gains that had been made by the Civil Rights movement. Shockley's published writings and lectures to scientific organizations on this topic, such as the National Academy of Sciences, were partly based on the research of Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen, Cyril Burt and H. J. Eysenck. Shockley also proposed that individuals with IQs below 100 be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization." Shockley donated substantial quantities of his own sperm to a sperm bank with the hope of brightening the prospects for future generations. This is not racist but a mis-placed belief, spawned in the social turmoil of the 1960s & only after he had been in a very severe auto accident, that somhow a world of high-IQ persons of all races & both genders would miraculously yield a BETTER result overall than mere random reproduction among lower-IQ, lower-skilled contributors to the human species. Perhaps you can leave the name of the park as it is & just write Shockley off as an eccentric old coot who survived a nasty traffic collision in the days BEFORE seat belts even existed...

Interesting points. I've never read 'Mein Kampf' nor is it likely to happen anytime soon. Same with 'Das Kapital'. Whenever I see the word "bourgeois" I konk out & lose focus completely.. Something from my childhood, perhaps. At the end of the day, though, it may be that trying to place The Fuhrer on a rational, political spectrum may be like trying to determine whether Charlie Manson is Left Wing or Right Wing, but in both cases the term "Wacko" does seem appropriate regardless of the Wing...

San Diego voters made the switch to a Strong Mayor system for a 5-year trial period beginning January 2006. They did so amidst a slew of scandals (not "crises" per se). One of those involved the Weak Mayor & at least one Councilmember accepting $$$ contributions in exchange for promises to change the city ordinances so that patrons of exotic dancing establishments could touch the dancers. There were shortages in the pension fund, FBI & SEC investigations, federal grand jury indictment of pension board members and loss of bond ratings sufficient to sell any municipal bonds at affordable rates. The Council-Manager system is susceptible to these sorts of extreme hanky-panky because responsiibility is diluted among the individuals who comprise the decision-making authority and it is much easier for those holding power to avoid accountability to the voters & bamboozle investigative journalists. It would put greater pressure on Kevin Johnson to PERFORM than he will otherwise experience by remaining merely a Weak Mayor & Junior Member of the Strong City Council. The Strong Mayor system is patterned after the system chosen by our nation's Founders & by all 50 States: a strong executive accountable directly to the voters with checks & balances provided by a City Council & Manager. Though Sacramento isn't facing the sea of scandals that San Diego faced in 2005 from its Council-Manager system, a switch to the Strong Mayor system, at least for a trial period, is worthy of voter consideration for increased accountability to the voters by a single indivdual.

Myth: Hitler was a leftist. Fact: Nearly all of Hitler's beliefs placed him on the far right. Many conservatives accuse Hitler of being a leftist, on the grounds that his party was named "National Socialist." But socialism requires worker ownership and control of the means of production. In Nazi Germany, private capitalist individuals owned the means of production, and they in turn were frequently controlled by the Nazi party and state. True socialism does not advocate such economic dictatorship...Hitler's other political beliefs place him almost always on the far right. He advocated racism over racial tolerance, eugenics over freedom of reproduction, merit over equality, competition over cooperation, power politics and militarism over pacifism, dictatorship over democracy, capitalism over Marxism, realism over idealism, nationalism over internationalism, exclusiveness over inclusiveness, common sense over theory or science, pragmatism over principle...