Proxy Book Quotes

Books are my friends, where it's okay to be silent, where you're not a freak if you don't want to get drunk, peel out in the parking lot, tip cows.

It seems priggish or pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers. My own healthy inheritance of original sin comes out in the book and I enjoyed raping and ripping by proxy. It is the novelist’s innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.

But the truth is, there's little even the most organized people can do to prepare themselves for having children. They can buy all the books, observe friends and relations, review their own memories of childhood. But the distance between those proxy experiences and the real thing, ultimately, can be measured in light-years.

I’m not sure Black people can be happy in this world. There’s just too much of a backstory of sadness that’s always clawing at their heels. And no matter how hard you try to outrun it, life always comes through with those reminders letting you know that, more than anything, you’re just a part of an exploited people and a denied destiny and all you can do is hate your past and, by proxy, hate yourself

The role of dominance and submission in human sexuality cannot be overstated. Our survey suggests that the majority (over 50%) of humans are very aroused by either acting out or witnessing dominance or submission. But it gets crazier than that: While 45% of women taking our survey said they found the naked male form to be very arousing and 48% said they found the sight of a penis to very arousing, a heftier 53% said they found their partner acting dominant in a sexual context to be very arousing. Dominance is literally more likely to be very arousing to the average female than naked men or penises. To say: “Dominance and submission are tied to human arousal patterns” is more of an understatement than saying: “Penises are tied to human arousal patterns.” We have a delectable theory about what is going on here: If you look at all the emotional states that frequently get tied to arousal pathways, the vast majority of them seem to be proxies for behaviors that would have been associated with our pre-human ancestors’ and early humans’ dominance and submission displays. For example, things like humiliation, being taken advantage of, chains, being used, being useful, being constrained, a lack of freedom, being prey, and a lack of free will may all have been concepts and emotions important in early human submission displays. We posit that most of the time when a human is turned on by a strange emotional concept—being bound for instance—their brain is just using that concept as a proxy for a pre-human submission display and lighting up the neural pathways associated with it, creating a situation in which it looks like a large number of random emotional states are turning humans on, when in reality they all boil down to just a fuzzy outline of dominance and submission. Heck, speaking of binding as a submission display, there were similar ritualized submission displays in the early middle ages, in which a vassal would present their hands clasped in front of their lord and allow the lord to hold their clasped hands in a way that rendered them unable to unclasp them (this submission display to one’s lord is where the symbolism of the Christian kneeling and hands together during prayer ritual comes from). We suspect the concept of binding and defenselessness have played important roles in human submission displays well into pre-history. Should all this be the case, why on earth have our brains been hardwired to bind (hehe) our recognition of dominance and submission displays to our sexual arousal systems?!?

The ethnic literary project has always been a humanist project in which nonwhite writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain. Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain? I don’t think, therefore I am—I hurt, therefore I am. Therefore, my books are graded on a pain scale. If it’s 2, maybe it’s not worth telling my story. If it’s 10, maybe my book will be a bestseller.

One cannot become a pundit by proxy.

Digital books are in some ways hastening the lazy, solipsistic narcissism of our culture. We use our gadgets as proxies for other people and genuine human interaction. And yes, I think that's bad.

For the first half of the book at least, Darcy seemed to be using Bingley as a strange sort of proxy for himself—trying to enact through Bingley and Jane’s break-up the extinction of his own feelings for Elizabeth.

As long ago as 1795, in an essay titled Perpetual Peace, Immanuel Kant worked out what such deterrence ultimately leads to: “A war, therefore, which might cause the destruction of both parties at once … would permit the conclusion of a perpetual peace only upon the vast burial-ground of the human species.”22 (Kant’s book title came from an innkeeper’s sign featuring a cemetery—not the type of perpetual peace most of us strive for.) Deterrence acts as only a temporary solution to the Hobbesian temptation to strike first, allowing both Leviathans to go about their business in relative peace, settling for small proxy wars in swampy Third World countries.

He certainly seems to have taken to fornication like a duck to water, she thought.  Maybe if you got past a certain point then instinct took over.  She certainly hoped so.  A sound at the door startled her, and she slammed the book shut guiltily and flung it from her.

(Yovel) "Jubilee," said Maire. "The day when all debts are forgiven."..."Yes," said Mr.Baram. "In the old holy books, there was a commandment that every fifty years, all debts were to be forgiven, all slaves were to be freed and all property returned. You are marked with the word of that commandment.

There is no branch of education called so universally into requisition as the art of letter writing; no station, high or low, where the necessity for correspondence is not felt; no person, young or old, who does not, at some time, write, cause to be written, and receive letters. From the President in his official capacity, with the busy pens of secretaries constantly employed in this branch of service, to the Irish laborer who, unable to guide a pen, writes, also by proxy, to his kinsfolks across the wide ocean; all, at some time, feel the desire to transmit some message, word of love, business, or sometimes enmity, by letter.

The motto is no longer ‘I think therefore I am.’ It’s not even ‘I’m a victim therefore I am.’ It’s now, ‘I self-flagellate therefore I am,’” he says. “It’s almost a theater of the absurd. The currency is victimhood by proxy. Whoever can grovel the most is the currency of the radical left.” Don’t be like them. Be better.

Baseball also has statistical rigor. Its gurus have an immense data set at hand, almost all of it directly related to the performance of players in the game. Moreover, their data is highly relevant to the outcomes they are trying to predict. This may sound obvious, but as we’ll see throughout this book, the folks building WMDs routinely lack data for the behaviors they’re most interested in. So they substitute stand-in data, or proxies. They draw statistical correlations between a person’s zip code or language patterns and her potential to pay back a loan or handle a job. These correlations are discriminatory, and some of them are illegal.

Faced with a totally controlled, monitored and owned online world, in which every utterance is immediately scanned and filed away, many have yet to make the connection that the best solution may not be running Tor and eighteen proxies, but writing things down on paper and talking face-to-face. Remember the mail? Remember conversations? Yeah, those still exist. Want to shake somebody out of their online trance? Send them a letter. Send them art. Want to record something that will last longer than a few seconds on Facebook or Twitter? Write a book. The physical world didn’t go anywhere. In fact, physical artifacts and experiences have only grown in totemic power the more we’ve pushed them away.

This is the history of governments, - one man does something which is to bind another. A man who cannot be acquainted with me, taxes me; looking from afar at me, ordains that a part of my labour shall go to this or that whimsical end, not as I, but as he happens to fancy. Behold the consequence. Of all debts, men are least willing to pay the taxes. What a satire is this on government! Everywhere they think they get their money's worth, except for these. Hence, the less government we have, the better, - the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government, is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation. That which all things tend to educe, which freedom, cultivation, intercourse, revolutions, go to form and deliver, is character; that is the end of nature, to reach unto this coronation of her king. To educate the wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires. The appearance of character makes the State unnecessary. The wise man is the State. He needs no army, fort, or navy, - he loves men too well; no bribe, or feast, or palace, to draw friends to him; no vantage ground, no favourable circumstance. He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is a prophet; no statute book, for he has the lawgiver; no money, for he is value; no road, for he is at home where he is; no experience, for the life of the creator shoots through him, and looks from his eyes. He has no personal friends, for he who has the spell to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him, needs not husband and educate a few, to share with him a select and poetic life. His relation to men is angelic; his memory is myrrh to them; his presence, frankincense and flowers.

You can read all the books in the world on the Nazi concentration camps and the gas chambers, and yet reality will draw upon you only when you are put through that yourself. It is a law of God, or nature, if you prefer, that pain, suffering and grief cannot be transferred or known by proxy. Neither empathy nor sympathy but experience alone is a valid currency of affliction. It alone makes you a card-holding member all allows you to join the club of the wretched of the earth. All else is counterfeit.

When we hear the old bells ringing out on a Sunday morning, we ask ourselves: can it be possible? This for a Jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was the son of God. The proof of such a claim is wanting. Within our times the Christian religion is surely an antiquity jutting out from a far-distant olden time; and the fact that people believe such a claim...is perhaps the oldest part of this heritage. A god who conceives children with a mortal woman; a wise man who calls us to work no more; to judge no more; but to heed the signs of the imminent apocalypse; a justice that accepts the innocent man as a proxy sacrifice; someone who has his disciplines drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of the afterlife, to which death is the gate; the figure of the cross as a symbol, in a time that no longer knows the purpose and shame of the cross - how horribly all this wafts over us, as from the grave of the ancient past! Are we to believe that such things are still believed?

But the truth is, there’s little even the most organized people can do to prepare themselves for having children. They can buy all the books, observe friends and relations, review their own memories of childhood. But the distance between those proxy experiences and the real thing, ultimately, can be measured in light-years. Prospective parents have no clue what their children will be like; no clue what it will mean to have their hearts permanently annexed; no clue what it will feel like to second-guess so many seemingly simple decisions, or to be multitasking even while they’re brushing their teeth, or to have a ticker tape of concerns forever whipping through their heads. Becoming a parent is one of the most sudden and dramatic changes in adult life.

[...] For instance, a gay man who played with dolls in his childhood, dresses pink and engages in anal sex with another man triggers a gender prejudice, by proxy rather than based on a characteristic of their own, like racism and classism do: dolls and pink are traditionally associated with the feminine sphere, anal sexuality has a higher stigma mainly because a more visible power level play comes into effect (with a dominant and a submissive role) than other sex positions. Consequently, when a man crosses his "designated" gender role boundary of masculinity, strength, dominance into femininity, weakness, submission, then he is no longer valued as a human being, for the man has become [or is] a woman. Therefore, homophobia and transphobia are actually by-products of misogyny, which is is turn gynophobic whitewashing, deeply rooted in the dominant ideology of patriarchy and historical sexism.

Oh, it’s perfectly safe to handle if somebody else has triggered the curse and you took it from their still-smoking body.” Eve paused. “Or if they sold it to you.” “You bought it, didn’t you?” Imp walked towards her. “Didn’t you?” “I think so. I may have screwed up that side of things,” Eve admitted. “It’s unclear.” “What’s unclear?” “It was up for auction: obvs, right? But it’s not clear that the person auctioning the location of the manuscript actually owned what they were selling, that’s the thing. Also, ancient death spells and intellectual property law don’t always play nice together. I, uh, my boss has a standard procedure he has me follow in cases of handling blackmail and extortion. We pay the ransom, then once we’ve destroyed the threat I repossess the payment from the blackmailer’s bank account. Via a Transnistrian mafiya underwriter—” This time it was Wendy who interrupted: “The Russian mafiya has underwriters?” “Transnistrian, please, and yes, criminal business models are inherently expensive because they have to pay for their own guard labor—there are no tax overheads, but no police protection for carrying out business, either—so of course they evolved parallel structures for risk management, mostly by embedding the risk in a concrete slab and dumping it in the harbor—anyway. At what stage does the book consider itself to have been legitimately acquired? And by whom? Is it safe for you to handle it, as my employee? What about as an independent freelance contractor not subject to the HMRC IR35 regulations? Am I an acceptable proxy for Bigge Enterprises, a Scottish Limited Liability Partnership domiciled in the Channel Islands, in the view of a particularly dim-witted nineteenth-century death spell attached to a codex bound in human skin by a mad inquisitor? It’s like digital rights management magic, only worse.

As Noam Chomsky so well explains in his book, What Uncle Sam Really Wants: When his rule was challenged by the Sandinistas [the insurgent group named after Augusto Cesar Sandino] in the late 1970s, the US first tried to institute what was called “Somocismo [Somoza-ism] without Somoza”- that is, the whole corrupt system intact, but with somebody else at the top. That didn’t work, so President Carter tried to maintain Somoza’s National Guard as a base for US power. The National Guard had always been remarkably brutal and sadistic. By June 1979, it was carrying out massive atrocities in the war against the Sandinistas, bombing residential neighborhoods in Managua, killing tens of thousands of people. At that point, the US ambassador sent a cable to the White House saying it would be “ill advised” to tell the Guard to call off the bombing, because that might interfere with the policy of keeping them in power and the Sandinistas out. Our ambassador to the Organization of American States also spoke in favor of “Somocismo without Somoza,” but the OAS rejected the suggestion flat out. A few days later, Somoza flew off to Miami with what was left of the Nicaraguan national treasury, and the Guard collapsed. The Carter administration flew Guard commanders out of the country in planes with Red Cross markings (a war crime), and began to reconstitute the Guard on Nicaragua’s borders. They also used Argentina as a proxy. (At that time, Argentina was under the rule of neo-Nazi generals, but they took a little time off from torturing and murdering their own population to help reestablish the Guard -- soon to be renamed the contras, or “freedom fighters.”)3 Again, we see Jimmy Carter not really living up to all of his lofty human rights rhetoric.

It is futile to pretend the problem doesn’t exist and hope that it will go away. Yet, absurdly, this has been American policy since the September 11 attacks. U.S. officials seem to believe that if they act as if Islam is a religion of peace and the Koran a book of peace, Muslims will feel themselves compelled to behave accordingly. An extreme example of this bizarre assumption came in President Obama’s heralded speech to the Islamic world in Cairo on June 4, 2009.16 Obama was extremely anxious to appear sympathetic and accommodating to Muslim grievances—so much so that he not only quoted the Koran (and did so ham-handedly and out of context, as we have seen), but also signaled in several ways, whether by ignorance or by design, that he was Muslim himself. For example, Obama extended “a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu alaykum”—that is, peace be upon you. According to Islamic law, however, this is the greeting that a Muslim extends to a fellow Muslim. To a non-Muslim he is to say, “Peace be upon those who are rightly guided”—in other words, “Peace be upon the Muslims.” Islamic law is silent about what Muslims must do when naïve, non-Muslim, Islamophilic presidents offer the greeting to Muslims. Obama also said the words that Muslims traditionally utter after mentioning the names of prophets—“peace upon them”—after mentioning Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. Does he, then, accept Muhammad as a prophet? No reporter has asked him, but that was decidedly the impression he gave, intentionally or not, to the Islamic world. Obama spoke of a “relationship between Islam and the West” marked by “centuries of coexistence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars.” He then named three sources of present-day tensions between Muslim countries and the United States: the legacy of Western colonialism; “a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations;” and “the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization,” which “led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.” Significantly, Obama only listed ways in which the West has allegedly mistreated the Islamic world. He said not a word about the Koran’s doctrines of jihad and religious supremacism. Nothing at all about the Koranic imperative to make war against and subjugate non-Muslims as dhimmis. Not a word about the culture of hatred and contempt for non-Muslims that arises from Koranic teachings and which existed long before the ostensibly harmful spread of American culture (“modernity and globalization”) around the world. Obama did refer to “violent extremists” who have “exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims.” The idea that Islamic jihadists are a “small but potent minority of Muslims” is universally accepted dogma, born of ignorance of the Koran’s contents. The jihadists may indeed be a minority of Muslims, but there is no solid evidence that the vast majority of Muslims reject in principle what the jihadists do—and indeed, how could they, given the Koran’s explicit mandates for warfare against Infidels?

policy makers often see the media agenda as a proxy for the public agenda and media content as their best insight into public opinion.

In 1999, a bunch of researchers published a study of about 1,600 adults examined in order to come up with equations to estimate kidney function. Just plug in the patient’s creatinine, age (because adults tend to lose muscle mass as we get older), and gender (because men tend to have more muscle mass than women), and voila!—an estimate of kidney function. Most laboratories can do this for us now. A rising creatinine level in the blood means the kidneys are not able to pee creatinine out as well as they used to, so the person’s estimated kidney function is lower. But wait—if the patient is Black, the study determined that you have to multiply by 1.2 to get a more accurate estimate. This finding was attributed to Blacks in the study having higher muscle mass than Whites and, therefore, higher amounts of creatinine in their bodies. Laboratories report the eGFR, and just below it, the eGFR if Black. Of course one of the problems with generalizations is that they aren’t always true. In medicine, in particular, they make us lazy and we often accept them without question—especially when they are in line with our underlying assumptions and beliefs. Like the belief that Black and African are inherently different from White and European at a DNA level, a belief that dates back to the days when American researchers were measuring Black-White differences in skull size to prove Black inferiority and justify slavery. But I wonder how often health-care providers make the mental adjustment that the “race adjustment” is really a proxy for muscle mass rather than just focusing on the race of the person in front of them when they are assessing lab results. I wonder if the person in front of them were a White male bodybuilder how many would tell him the race-adjusted estimate of kidney function, or a skinny Black woman the non-race-adjusted estimate. Then too I wonder how many health-care practitioners realize that equations derived from the original study of 1,600 people only included about 200 Blacks—and no American Samoans, no Hispanics, no Asians. These groups have very different body frames, but all are simply “not Black” in our equations. The implication, then, is that only Black people are different. This shortcut has the potential for a significant negative impact on Black patients who happen to not have a high muscle mass. Patients like Book of Eli. When the non-race-adjusted eGFR is 20 (when a person can be placed on the waiting list), the race-adjusted value is closer to 25. Just as the difference between eGFRs of 20 and 10 can be several years for many patients, so can the difference between 25 and 20. Years of accruing time on the kidney transplant waiting list when thirteen people on the waiting list die every day waiting for a kidney.

Union Street Railway was a New Bedford, Massachusetts-based bus company. With the equity trading below the net cash on the company’s balance sheet, Union Street was a classic net-net when Buffett bought the stock. This was a small, thinly traded company with a market capitalization below $1 million. The small float meant acquiring stock required a bit of work and persistence by the young, enterprising investor. Like the other stocks discussed so far, it was cheap. But in contrast to the previous investments discussed in this book, this one was actually losing money at the time of Buffett’s purchase. Yet this stock would be a huge winner for Buffett, yielding him a dollar profit worth more than 4.5x the average household yearly income at the time. After accumulating a meaningful stake in the company, Buffett took a trip to Massachusetts to meet with the company’s president. While he did not run a proxy contest or take aggressive action to prompt a capital return, the company paid a substantial dividend shortly after his visit.109 Union Street Railway was an early lesson in how positive changes in capital allocation can lead to windfall profits.

Charcoal—the very thing Ban is made of—is so messy. I was covered from my brow to my waist like the chimney sweep in the poems of William Blake in every art class of my youth. As a teenager, I used to play truant every Wednesday and catch the train to Pimlico, still in my uniform and with my packed lunch, as if I was going to school. I went to the Tate—every Wednesday—like clockwork—to look—at the illuminated books—of Blake—in a very dark room intended to preserve—the golden ink and peacock green or blue embellishments. The error here is that I chose to write my book in place where these colors and memories are not readily available. There is no bank. Instead, I scream them—I scream the colors each to each—and this is difficult. It is difficult to work in simple, powerful ways with the proxy memories. For weeks at a time, I stopped writing—and when I returned, Ban was gone. She continued on without me, and what I had to do next will make you dislike me even more than you already do. I had to eat was on the floor. I had to make an artifact out of something that had left no artifacts. I had to put the charcoal in my mouth and choke it down.

Bizarre and Surprising Insights—Consumer Behavior Insight Organization Suggested Explanation7 Guys literally drool over sports cars. Male college student subjects produce measurably more saliva when presented with images of sports cars or money. Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management Consumer impulses are physiological cousins of hunger. If you buy diapers, you are more likely to also buy beer. A pharmacy chain found this across 90 days of evening shopping across dozens of outlets (urban myth to some, but based on reported results). Osco Drug Daddy needs a beer. Dolls and candy bars. Sixty percent of customers who buy a Barbie doll buy one of three types of candy bars. Walmart Kids come along for errands. Pop-Tarts before a hurricane. Prehurricane, Strawberry Pop-Tart sales increased about sevenfold. Walmart In preparation before an act of nature, people stock up on comfort or nonperishable foods. Staplers reveal hires. The purchase of a stapler often accompanies the purchase of paper, waste baskets, scissors, paper clips, folders, and so on. A large retailer Stapler purchases are often a part of a complete office kit for a new employee. Higher crime, more Uber rides. In San Francisco, the areas with the most prostitution, alcohol, theft, and burglary are most positively correlated with Uber trips. Uber “We hypothesized that crime should be a proxy for nonresidential population.…Uber riders are not causing more crime. Right, guys?” Mac users book more expensive hotels. Orbitz users on an Apple Mac spend up to 30 percent more than Windows users when booking a hotel reservation. Orbitz applies this insight, altering displayed options according to your operating system. Orbitz Macs are often more expensive than Windows computers, so Mac users may on average have greater financial resources. Your inclination to buy varies by time of day. For retail websites, the peak is 8:00 PM; for dating, late at night; for finance, around 1:00 PM; for travel, just after 10:00 AM. This is not the amount of website traffic, but the propensity to buy of those who are already on the website. Survey of websites The impetus to complete certain kinds of transactions is higher during certain times of day. Your e-mail address reveals your level of commitment. Customers who register for a free account with an Earthlink.com e-mail address are almost five times more likely to convert to a paid, premium-level membership than those with a Hotmail.com e-mail address. An online dating website Disclosing permanent or primary e-mail accounts reveals a longer-term intention. Banner ads affect you more than you think. Although you may feel you've learned to ignore them, people who see a merchant's banner ad are 61 percent more likely to subsequently perform a related search, and this drives a 249 percent increase in clicks on the merchant's paid textual ads in the search results. Yahoo! Advertising exerts a subconscious effect. Companies win by not prompting customers to think. Contacting actively engaged customers can backfire—direct mailing financial service customers who have already opened several accounts decreases the chances they will open more accounts (more details in Chapter 7).

If you've made it this far in this book, you might be thinking yourself lucky. You might be feeling be feeling grateful that you never went to a tea party meeting, you never wrote a climate research paper, you never donated to Prop 8, you never supported Scott Walker, you never donated any money to ALEC, you never ran a company subject to shareholder proxies, you never volunteered for Americans for Prosperity, you have never had your speech rights assaulted. Only, you'd be wrong. You have. Every person in the United States of America did on Sept. 11, 2014. That day goes down in constitutional infamy. In some ways it shouldn't have come as a surprise. The Left started its intimidation game by trying to silence a non profit here a company there, a big donor here a trade associate there, but along the way it wrapped in small donors and scholars and scientists and petition signers and share holders and free market professors and grass root groups. It was only a matter of time before it came to the obvious conclusion - everybody has too much free speech. And so on Sept. 11, 2014, fifty four members of the senate democratic caucus voted to do something that has never been attempted in the history of the this glorious country. They voted to alter the first amendment.

He’s changed?” “Yes. He’s started hanging out with a different crowd, a richer crowd. The men are all so arrogant. They don’t doubt themselves for a minute. They go to work and people agree with them all day long. And then they come home and their wives agree with them too. It’s a rarefied group, but—if you hang around with them long enough—it starts to feel like that’s how things should be. Regular working families, families where wives are equals, begin to seem like losers. You know the husband would start bossing the wife around if he made enough money, if he was man enough.” Sarah raised an eyebrow. “Man enough?” “Yes. It’s surreal. You’ve got all these nerdy-looking, chubby men who built their fortunes behind desks. And as soon as they get rich, they start using all this macho language, as if they’re gangsters or something. The other day, I heard one of Andrew’s partners talking about a competitor starting a price war. He said, ‘If those bastards screw with us, we’ll take ’em to the mattresses.’” Sarah caught the Godfather reference and smiled. “Yes. I’ve heard that kind of talk before. Bank account becomes a proxy for dick size.” “Exactly!

Human history is in large part nonsense, and I think it is appropriate to pay tribute to the percentage of the nonsense that is not tragic, that is harmless, even benign. Looking back at the challenges flung to us by the Soviets in our long struggle for hearts and minds, it is striking to realize how elegant, how courtly they tended to be. Their dancers and their skaters carried themselves like Romanovs, grave and unapproachable, aesthetically chaste and severe. It is striking as well how effectively their classicism governed the competition. Ballet was suddenly urgently important in America. Our orchestras were heroes of democracy for doing well just what they had always done. The Russians rejected modernism, and we looked a little askance at it ourselves, or flaunted it to the point of self-parody. Behind it all was an unspoken assumption carried on from the nineteenth century, that a great culture proved the health, worth, and integrity of a civilization. This was a sensitive issue for both countries, Russia having entered late into the Europe its arts so passionately emulated, America having entered late into existence as a nation. There are respects in which Russia was a good adversary. When they launched their first satellite, my little public school became more serious about my education. They helped to sensitize us to the hypocrisy of our position on civil rights, doing us a great service. This is not to minimize all that was regrettable, the doomsday stockpiles and that entrenched habit of ideological thinking, which lives on today among us, often in oddly inverted form, for example in the cult of Ayn Rand and the return of social Darwinism. The use of culture as proxy, its appropriation for political purposes, yielded a fair amount of self-consciousness and artificiality. Perhaps it compromised the authenticity of culture in ways that have contributed to the marginalization we see now. Still, given certain inevitabilities that beset the postwar world, the Russians were interesting and demanding of us, until our obsessions drifted elsewhere.

Tonight, my violence has a proxy.

The immigration debate in America today is not really about immigration. Nor is it about national security, the economy or the vagaries of our outdated asylum system. Like much else in our civic life, the immigration debate is mostly a proxy for domestic policies and the culture wars. It just happens to a particularly potent proxy because it tends to elicit strong feelings about the American dream, ethnic identity, class and nationhood. That is to say, immigration is an issue that’s ripe for exploitation and cooption by both the Left and the Right. Each side can easily condemn the other without ever getting down to debating actual US policy on its merits. This is one reason why we still have an immigration system that dates from 1965. Book Review: “They’re not sending their best.” Claremont Review of Books, volume 20, no.3 (summer, 2020). P.45

But happy? No. I’m not sure Black people can be happy in this world. There’s just too much of a backstory of sadness that’s always clawing at their heels. And no matter how hard you try to outrun it, life always comes through with those reminders letting you know that, more than anything, you’re just a part of an exploited people and a denied destiny and all you can do is hate your past and, by proxy, hate yourself.

An architect is a person who plans, designs, and reviews the construction of buildings. Their finished product is hard to change as it is, literally, poured in concrete. Software changes all the time, even many years after installation, so it is surprising just how much architect Christopher Alexander’s 1977 book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction has influenced the software industry. Alexander’s book is about the timeless way of building.

The top 1% of the world’s wealthy control more than 50% of all wealth, according to Credit Suisse’s global wealth report. In the United States, the 1% own more wealth than the bottom 90%. The number of millionaires in the world has tripled in the decades since 2000. And the amount of the world’s wealth controlled by the bottom 50% of the global population? Under 3%. These inequalities are more than numbers. They are fuel for high emotions and mass social change. They have led to the rise of populist political movements and propelled a variety of unlikely candidates into power. The difference between the top 1% and all the rest gets our attention. So much for money. Let’s now consider something infinitely more valuable: happiness. Specifically, the happiness found in Bliss Brain. Here we also find huge inequalities. Historically, Bliss Brainers are a tiny percentage of the population. Few even attempt the journey to enlightenment, and of those who seek Nirvana, even fewer attain it. When a rare spiritual genius, such as Jesus or Buddha, reached that pinnacle, the event was so significant that it changed the entire course of world history. WITHDRAWING FROM EVERYDAY LIFE The lives of the great spiritual masters of history inspired others to follow their example. But like the saints, these aspirants could not reach enlightenment in the everyday world, with its demons and distractions. So for thousands of years, those committed to the spiritual path went to special places such as hermitages, wilderness retreats, monasteries, and convents. They exiled themselves from ordinary society in order to pursue nonordinary states of consciousness. They couldn’t achieve Bliss Brain amid the hubbub of society, so they turned their backs on it. The rest of society stayed in ordinary consciousness, driven by the desires and demons of the Default Mode Network (DMN). In my book Mind to Matter, I call this survival orientation “Caveman Brain.” It’s hard to find Bliss Brain when surrounded by Caveman Brain, and pulling yourself out of that environment and into a sacred space is usually a prerequisite for enlightenment. What percentage of the population undertook the journey? No census of enlightenment seekers is possible, but one proxy is the number entering religious seclusion. In the early 1300s, England had a monastic population of about 22,000, with another 10,000 in other religious occupations.

CHAPTER 4 THE ONE PERCENT The top 1% of the world’s wealthy control more than 50% of all wealth, according to Credit Suisse’s global wealth report. In the United States, the 1% own more wealth than the bottom 90%. The number of millionaires in the world has tripled in the decades since 2000. And the amount of the world’s wealth controlled by the bottom 50% of the global population? Under 3%. These inequalities are more than numbers. They are fuel for high emotions and mass social change. They have led to the rise of populist political movements and propelled a variety of unlikely candidates into power. The difference between the top 1% and all the rest gets our attention. So much for money. Let’s now consider something infinitely more valuable: happiness. Specifically, the happiness found in Bliss Brain. Here we also find huge inequalities. Historically, Bliss Brainers are a tiny percentage of the population. Few even attempt the journey to enlightenment, and of those who seek Nirvana, even fewer attain it. When a rare spiritual genius, such as Jesus or Buddha, reached that pinnacle, the event was so significant that it changed the entire course of world history. WITHDRAWING FROM EVERYDAY LIFE The lives of the great spiritual masters of history inspired others to follow their example. But like the saints, these aspirants could not reach enlightenment in the everyday world, with its demons and distractions. So for thousands of years, those committed to the spiritual path went to special places such as hermitages, wilderness retreats, monasteries, and convents. They exiled themselves from ordinary society in order to pursue nonordinary states of consciousness. They couldn’t achieve Bliss Brain amid the hubbub of society, so they turned their backs on it. The rest of society stayed in ordinary consciousness, driven by the desires and demons of the Default Mode Network (DMN). In my book Mind to Matter, I call this survival orientation “Caveman Brain.” It’s hard to find Bliss Brain when surrounded by Caveman Brain, and pulling yourself out of that environment and into a sacred space is usually a prerequisite for enlightenment. What percentage of the population undertook the journey? No census of enlightenment seekers is possible, but one proxy is the number entering religious seclusion. In the early 1300s, England had a monastic population of about 22,000, with another 10,000 in other religious occupations.

We fight to establish fundamental truths. The proxies fight over whether or not meat from a particular species of animal should be eaten, or on which day it should be eaten, or how it should be prepared. But I admit that I do rather admire them. They could certainly teach you a thing or two about revenge.

But corpus planning may also be a proxy for other political ends, as for example in the Nazis’ attempts to ‘purify’ the German language of French loan words.

Why was I bent on encouraging people to change their lives? Because I've watched my generation stop reading books, stop reading the newspaper, stop voting in local elections? Because I've watched money/salary become a proxy for respect, and then a synonym for respect, and then the only kind of respect that counts? Because I have seen us judge books we have not read, politicians we have not heard, musicians we have not listened to, referendums we have not debated, and fellow citizens we have not met? Because I have seen us torn apart by jealousy for what others our age have accomplished, rather than celebrating those accomplishments? Because I have seen us glorify those who make decisions over those who enact decisions, prefer being a consultant to being fully engaged, being an investor to being invested in, being an advisor over being politically involved, being an expert over being partisan, being a news analyst over being a news gatherer--all in fear of the inflexible boredom of commitment?

By the twenty-forties governments were no more than proxy management teams for a new global power and voting became just another decision that was taken on people’s behalf.

There is nothing quite like the unnatural power that the death of a loved one has on a person. It is a pain that no medicine can cure. It is a tumor rooted in the bones and the soul that no surgery can cut out. It is an inescapable reality that insists on being lived in. The brightest days seem dark. The warmest colors appear cold. So powerful is the experience that it can dull the senses in a way that takes a person out of life itself a death by proxy.

they must use a proxy endpoint (also called a surrogate endpoint or marker), a measure expected to be closely correlated to the endpoint they would measure if they could.

They all said that he sent a proxy. Some girl with curly blonde hair who left right around the time you went to get some air. You think she could have something to do with this?” Lemming asks. I try my best to sound disinterested. “Nah, she was just some hang-around he sent to disrespect Belly’s service instead of showing his ugly face. I saw the girl. She was young. Skinny. Too frail to have the kind of power it takes to shove a knife into someone’s skull.” “And how would you know that?” he asks. “Discovery Channel,” I deadpan.

In today’s world, many do not see the Prophet as a mercy. They see in him (perhaps as Ka‘b first did) only a sword. Some of these claim Islam as their religion and seek to make themselves into martyrs when what the Qur’an actually calls for is witnesses. Contemporary “jihadist” ideologies falsify the past, caricature the Prophet, and mock the Qur’an. They seem to forget that the Book names God as the Merciful, the Compassionate. But the Qur’an also makes it clear that God’s mercy is all-encompassing: My Mercy encompasses all things (Q 7:156). The name, al-Rahman, the Merciful, is more frequently used than any other as proxy for God’s personal name, Allah, in the Qur’an. For these (and other) reasons, classical Islamic theology sometimes refers to “the Merciful” as God’s comprehensive name (ism jam‘)—in contradistinction to the name of His Essence (ism dhat). The idea, in a manner of speaking, is that God’s mercy encompasses even God Himself. So-called “jihadists” deny with their deeds that the Prophet was a merciful man sent by a merciful God. It is no coincidence that all such groups are vehemently anti-Sufi. They condemn virtually all the doctrines and practices outlined in this essay, thoughts and deeds that have made life meaningful for millions of West Africans. Curiously, most so-called “fundamentalists” even condemn the routine recitation of God’s names, dhikr—like al-Rahman, a staple of many litanies. One wonders whether these “fundamentalists” even read the Qur’an! For it contains stern warnings for those who abandon dhikr, thereby forgetting that God is Merciful, and thus becoming merciless devils themselves: And whoever is blind to remembrance of the Merciful, We appoint for him a devil as a constant companion. And indeed the devils avert them from the path while they think themselves guided (Q 43:36–37).

The market is simply a proxy, or a pseudonym, for the rich and powerful, for the capitalist elite. In expressions such as, “The market did x, y, or z”, or, “The market reacted badly to the news”, or “The market demanded a new policy”, or, “The market gave it the thumbs down”, if you simply substitute “capitalist elite” for the word “market”, you will comprehend what’s going on.

And by proxy we link ourselves to those and try as much as we can to enter into who we are: people of compassion.