“ A world that places any value on the idea of universal human rights
should no longer overlook North Korea’s enormities. ” —The Economist

Frank Lloyd Wright, The Natural House

New Sense of Repose in Quiet Streamline Effects

“ Vistas of inevitable simplicity and ineffable harmonies would open, so beautiful to me that I was not only delighted, but often startled. ”

Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief, Chapter 5

Azanian Propaganda

“ It was from the least expected quarter, the tribesmen and villagers, that the real support for Seth’s Birth Control policy suddenly appeared. ”

Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom, Pp. 406-7.

Jacob’s Summary

“ The biblical counterpart of Odysseus, Jacob must solve the fundamental human difficulties illustrated in the pre-Abrahamic chapters of Genesis. ”

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, A Dangerous Place, Chapter 1: A Half-Life, p8-9

An Act of Courage and of Daring

“ In that I was a member of the Cabinet, protocol provided that I step out of Air Force One behind the President and ahead of Kissinger, who was also on the journey. Somehow Kissinger invariably reached the ground ahead of me. ”

Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (paperback edition), p210-1

A Well-Scrubbed, Cute Little Boy

“ I couldn’t manage to be anywhere near a nun, let alone a pair of them, without a mind awash in my none-too-pure Jewish thoughts. ”

Ian Fleming, Diamonds are Forever

Rue de la Pay

“ It was natural to bring out the small change and jerk the handles and watch the lemons and the oranges and the cherries and the bell fruits whirl round to their final click-pause-ting, followed by a soft mechanical sigh. Five cents, ten cents, a quarter. Bond gave them all a try… ”

David Pryce-Jones, “Jews, Arabs, and French Diplomacy: A Special Report”

The Zionists Must Understand

“ The Zionists must understand once and for all that there can be no question of constituting an independent Jewish state in Palestine, or even forming some sovereign Jewish body. ”

Charles Darwin, The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, Chapter 1, General Principles of Expression

Purposeless Remnants of Habitual Movements

“ It is well known that cats dislike wetting their feet, owing, it is probable, to their having aboriginally inhabited the dry country of Egypt; and when they wet their feet they shake them violently. My daughter poured some water into a glass close to the head of a kitten; and it immediately shook its feet in the usual manner; so that here we have an habitual movement falsely excited by an associated sound instead of by the sense of touch. ”

Edward Lear, Journals of a Landscape Painter in the Balkans

Were it Not for this Protector

“ Not the least annoyance was that given me by the persevering attentions of a mad or fanatic dervish, of most singular appearance as well as conduct. His note of ‘Shaitán‘ was frequently sounded; and as he twirled about, and performed many curious antics, he frequently advanced to me, shaking a long hooked stick, covered with jingling ornaments, in my very face, pointing to the Kawas with menacing looks, as though he would say, “Were it not for this protector you should he annihilated, you infidel!” ”

Robert Graves, I, Claudius

Ask Me Anything

“ The drink was as remarkable as the food, and Caligula became so lively as the meal went on that, deprecating his own generosity to Herod in the past as something hardly worth mentioning, he now promised to give him whatever it lay in his power to grant. “Ask me anything, my dearest Herod,” he said, “And it shall be yours.” He repeated: “Absolutely anything. I swear by my own Divinity that I will grant it.” ”

the United Nations, The Declaration of the Universal Human Rights of Man

Born Free and Equal

“ On December 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Following this historic act the Assembly called upon all Member countries to publicize the text of the Declaration and “to cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions, without distinctions based on the political status of countries or territories.” ”

George Orwell, a letter (the new book referred to is 1984)

You Have to Leave Glasgow about 8am

“ We also have to shoot rabbits when the larder gets low, and grow vegetables, though of course I haven’t been here long enough to get much return from the ground yet, as it was simply a jungle when I got here. With all this you can imagine that I don’t do much work however I have actually begun my new book and hope to have done four or five chapters by the time I come back in October. ”

E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

Curious Shockheads

“ Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom. ”

Peter Davison, an interview with Stanley Plumly

On The and Story

“ The subtext of narrative is time, the subtext of time is mortality, the subtext of mortality is emotion. Try to remove the narrative sense of things and you take out the heart, the cause of the effect. ”

Aluf Benn interviews David Mamet.

Shai Agassi’s Better Place electric cars roll out in Israel.

Wherein Spengler attempts to understand zombies.

Re Facebook, “Mark Zuckerberg is to uselessness what Henry Ford was to the automobile.”

“Nation on the Move” is the magnificent second episode of the America Revealed PBS series. Interestingly, the show is British-made.

“He was no longer so worried about becoming a man; he felt that to an extent he had become one. But in his heart he wondered if he would ever learn the language of men.” A study of Mad Men‘s Pete Campbell character, interspersed with quotes from Norman Mailer’s immortal short story, “The Language of Men”.

At last I understand Picasso’s adage, “Artists don’t copy, they steal,” this being an example of copying: Travesty/pastiche/parody of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House. It is the anti-FLLW house. Just look at the fireplace in IMG_0053.JPG, which can only be described as pitiful.

Photos by Paul Ringstrom of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Muirhead Farmhouse which I had not heard of until this moment. I just love it. Beautiful brickwork that seems to be just the same as unbeautiful brickwork. Perfect shapes. The slightly outcropping wooden ziggurat on top. Oooh. Also the Sims House.

The power shvitz in the basement of the Finnish embassy in Washington.

Marc Martel of downhere does justice to Queen’s “Somebody to Love” backed by, among others, Brian May and Roger Taylor.

Enjoy President Obama’s excellent stand-up at the 2012 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He delivered much better than the amateurish host, Jimmy Kimmel.

George Friedman of Stratfor on Israel’s new strategic environment, republished by the UK Defence Forum. Also, Friedman on Turkey’s strategy", Iran’s and Russia’s".

Impressive, lengthy, casual yet in-depth conversation between The Economist and the very Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Love her up close and personal potted history of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict since 1995.

More mind-blowing, analyst-beating news from Apple. 35.1 million iPhones sold last quarter.

Though I and the author, 42-year-old David Bainbridge, may be biased, middle-aged humans are the crowning achievement of evolution. [via aldaily.com]

UBS: The three letters explaining why Sarkozy will lose the French presidency?

10 fantastic movie scenes that were more real than you knew.

Josef Joffe, editor of Hamburg’s Die Zeit, analyses Günter Grass’s What Must Be Said.

The Guardian’s Battle for the Internet feature, including Tim Berners-Lee’s warning about walled gardens. BTW, if you’re reading this on Facebook, I don’t write these Train entries on Facebook, but on my own site at http://adamkhan.net, and a nice Facebook app called RSS Graffiti sends them over.

Hopefully this means I can feel a little less sickly, cos I use the term quite a lot.

Walking in America, or rather the lack thereof. A 4-part series in Slate, by Tom Vanderbilt (whom I met 1996). What he doesn’t correlate national walking statistics to, and it seems to me the obvious thing, is the number of anti-depressants prescribed.

In The American Interest, a clearly written explanation of why America’s economy will roar back (well, enough of it). Serve with this, from the London Review of Books, an overview of Karl Marx’s prescience.

Dore Gold’s Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs summarizes the gradual thawing of China-Israel relations as China matures.

List of shame. Among the morally impaired UK luvvies requesting a boycott of Habimah are Jonathan Miller and Alexei Sayle.

The New Yorker on the Daily Mail.

An anthropologist among the evangelicals.

Complete Guide to Urine Therapy. I think I’m sold.

Lovely long interview in national treasure Haaretz with national treasure Amos Oz.

Sober and crisp analysis of Britain’s 2012 budget from an income tax perspective.

The teardown: iPad.

Yossi Klein Halevi articulates Israeli feeling on Obama’s “got your back” statement.

Jeffrey Goldberg, who seems to be seeing a lot of the President lately, relates what happened when he presented Barack Obama with a copy of the New American Haggadah.

Paul Graham PyCon US 2012 keynote wherein he spells out some of the big ambitious start-up ideas on our collective mind. Be the next Google. Fix email. Be the next Apple. Replace universities. Ongoing diagnostic healthcare.

Creativity: we’re coming to understand it.

Scientists claim brain memory code cracked.

On the rise of the ebook and how it’s just another step in the increasing convenience of distributing a written work, just as books typeset on paper are.

Siri voice recognition punctuation reference.

CNN’s video and transcript of President Obama’s 2012 Super Tuesday press conference dealing with Israel, Iran, Syria.

Buy or rent?

Milton Friedman’s “How to Cure Health Care”, required reading, whether you lean left or rightward.

Jeffrey Goldberg interviews a very articulate, reasonable-sounding President Barack Obama prior to Netanyahu’s visit.

“We don’t have castles and noble titles, so how do you indicate you’re part of the elite?” Wicked piece on TED by Benjamin Wallace.

Taking his time, Morozov asks the right questions about Steve Jobs, comparing him first to the Bauhaus movement, then to Henry Ford. Many quotable quotes, and good comments, especially the long one from JakeH at 02/27/2012 – 7:46pm EDT.

Photographer Paul Conroy makes his escape from Homs through a sewer.

Ensuring that Iran does not go nuclear is the best guarantee for long-term regional stability. Amos Yadlin, one of eight Israeli fighter pilots who bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak, debunks some conventional wisdom on attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Peter Thiel to Francis Fukuyama, full of quotable sentences. “We cannot simply say things went wrong with credit creation in the 1980s; we also have to deal with government malfunction in the 1970s.” “There’s a close link between technological deceleration and increasing cynicism and pessimism about politics and economics.” “There has been this increase in inequality, but it’s a secondary truth. The primary truth is this truth of stagnation.”

Gallup poll: Americans cite their enemies as #1 Iran, #2 China, #3 North Korea.

Turns out that in the USA, according to recent research by American Sociological Association, “the ‘bitter clingers’ are increasingly better educated and more affluent than the unchurched” (via Via Meadia).

Nice review of Scorsese’s documentary on George Harrison, Living in the Material World. “Scorsese is making a film about something that matters, but never quite succeeds in conveying that.” Here’s Variety’s smarter review.