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Jordan Peterson is often called a rock star. It is a title he flatly rejects.

I am not a performance artist, states the celebrated clinical psychologist, I dont have fans, I have people who are listening carefully to what I am saying.

Petersons universal appeal is undeniable. His worldwide lecture tours routinely sell out and his bestseller 12 Rules for Life has been translated into more than 30 languages. Nearly three million followers subscribe to his YouTube channel, his lectures count a staggering 145 million views, and his podcast has been downloaded over 55,000,000 times.

The Toronto professor skyrocketed to fame in 2016, when he fiercely objected to Canadas C-16 bill, which mandated the use of transgender pronouns. Peterson became the traditionalists hero and his name soon became synonymous with the anti-PC movement.

But Petersons narrative does not concern politics or current events. His search is for eternal values virtues and themes that are common across all human experience, across all time.

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Moses was wandering around with the Israelites forever in the desert, Peterson tells the attentive audience. Theyre going left and going right and worshiping idols and having a hell of a time... getting rebellious, and Moses goes up on the mountain and he has this tremendous revelation, sort of, in the sight of God, and it illuminates him and he comes down with the law. Through mediating and trying to keep the peace, Moses considered what principles of peace would satisfy the people. Through Gods intervention he presented the Ten Commandments to the people to say, Look, this is already basically what were doing but now its codified. Thats all a historical process thats condensed into a single story, says Peterson. But obviously that happened, because we have written law that emerged from the bottom up.

LAW IS also touched on through the first chapters of Genesis, along with the idea that both male and female were made in the image of God.

The notion that every single human being regardless of their peculiarities, strangenesses, sins, crimes and all of that has something Divine in them that needs to be regarded with respect, plays an integral role... in the creation of habitable order out of chaos. Its an idea that Peterson believes sits at the base of our legal system. We see how the archetypal Adam and Eve story represents a situation we are always in. Just like Adam and Eve, we humans live in a walled garden, explains Peterson, but there is always a snake. The garden is a place of paradise, warmth, love and sustenance, but its also the place where something can pop up at any moment and knock you out of it. Through Abraham, the father of nations who was ordered by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, we consider what sacrifice is. We realize how without sacrifice, modern civilization would not have come into being. It is our ability to envision ourselves in the future and the need to make a sacrifice in the present that allowed us to progress and thrive.

We follow Cain and Abels dramatic tale as they lead two different life paths. Abel pleases God while Cain becomes resentful and murderous. Through Peterson we see how Cains torment grows. Gods rejection of his sacrifices means that his attempts to give up something valuable in the present to ensure prosperity in the future are insufficient, and in consequence, he fails to prosper.

Every line is a passage to our past, loaded with illuminating insight into human psyche, behavior, evolution and even the origin of the text itself. The story of the Mesopotamian deity Marduk, for example, sheds light on what the Hebrew words tohu vavohu typically translated as unformed and void actually mean. Marduk, who had eyes all the way around his head, fought a deity called Tiamat. We need to know that, explains Peterson, because the word Tiamat is associated with the word tehom. Tehom is the chaos that God makes order out of at the beginning of time in Genesis. Petersons exploration of biblical stories is a journey filled with enlightenment and wonder.

More than 21 million people have tuned in and listened to Petersons gripping journey into the mysterious tales. We see the values and virtues upon which our entire civilization is founded, and the repercussions of neglecting them. We realize that values such as responsibility, humility, sacrifice, striving and courage have lasted for a reason, how they enabled the construction of our magnificent civilization, and the danger posed to our very existence if we lose them.

The idea is to see if theres something at the bottom of this amazing civilization that weve managed to structure, and that I think is in peril, says Peterson. Maybe if we understand it a little bit better we wont be so prone just to throw the damn thing away.

Originally posted here:
Jordan Peterson turns to Genesis for lessons on civilization in peril - The Jerusalem Post

Ernest Clines Ready Player One was a jukebox musical for trash culture of the 80s, a vision of a near-future dystopia where things were so bad, Zaxxon and Twisted Sister were classic works of art meriting serious scholarly attention. Life is certainly imitating art, at least as far as the dystopian nature of 2020 is concerned. So who wouldnt want to read a sequel?

Ready Player Two picks up in medias res after the events of the first book. Our hero, teen gamer Wade Watts, and his motley group of Internet friends have solved the mysterious riddles of one James Halliday, inventor of the OASIS, which is some sort of futuristic extra-cool Second Life for our environmentally-ravaged future. By virtue of finding the many Easter Eggs Halliday has hidden around the Internet and learning the minutiae of the movies and video games he loved, Wade has inherited his company and become the richest and most famous man in the world. Everything is swell! Except that Halliday has left Wade one more thing: an advanced neural interface which allows the user full sensory overload instead of the crummy old immersive VR experiences of yore.

I was awestruck by the perfect replication of all that interlinked sensory input, Wade enthuses, munching on a virtual apple, his olfactory system in kinetic overdrive. These were subtle, nuanced sensations that could never be re-created or simulated by a pair of haptic gloves.

Okay, so Proust this is not. In the hands of a more agile writer, there might be ripe potential for satire here; Halliday is, quite literally, a deus ex machina figure, constantly one step ahead of his billions of devoted OASIS minions. If it werent for Clines obvious affection for the sheer hubris of creating a virtual world in ones image, Halliday would seem like a mustache-twirling digital archvillain, a Bezos writ large.

Thats the overwhelming issue with the Ready Player Whatever universe: at no point does Cline question the wisdom of an all-encompassing monoculture that screeches to a halt around 1988, while technology evolves at hyperspeed around it. Ah, the good old days, he sighs, and writes another chapter about fucking Donkey Kong or whatever. Hes the Gamemaster Anthony of genre fiction, a clunky stylist content to wallop the reader over the head with a never-ending barrage of Remember when?s.

In Ready Player One, the main antagonists were the corporate suits of Innovative Online Industries, which was sort of a combination of a for-profit online university and an internment camp. By the end of the first chapter of Ready Player Two, our heroes have managed a hostile takeover of IOI and transformed themselves into an unstoppable megacorporation with a global monopoly on the worlds most popular entertainment, education, and communications platform, as well as releasing all of IOIs indentured servants and, presumably, creating a massive labor crisis. But they finally manage to pay off the national debt and donate hundreds of billions of dollars to solve world poverty, or something. So thats nice!

Their efforts to ditch this crappy planet and terraform the nearest habitable rock eventually fall by the wayside when an evil sentient AI springs the murderous CEO of IOI out of prison and forces our heroes to go on a lengthy fetch quest through VR time and space to retrieve the seven pieces ofoh, who cares. At this point you already know whether or not Ready Player Two is the book for you. It is not the book for me.

Cline had some legitimately good ideas the first time around. Theres potential in interrogating the nature of escapism in times of social upheaval. This time, though, instead of character development, hes chosen to double down on lengthy, dull descriptions of battle scenes and minutely-detailed virtual worlds. A complicated boss fight against Princeyes, Princeis crassly opportunistic even by the standards of posthumous tributes to Prince. A climactic showdown in Middle-Earth is as monotonous and impenetrable as The Silmarillion itself.

Add to that some of the most excruciating sex scenes in recent fiction and youve got the stuff of nightmares. We lost our virginity to each other three days after that first kiss, Wade reminisces. Then we spent the rest of that week sneaking off to make the beast with two backs at every opportunity. Like Depeche Mode, we just couldnt get enough. Oh, brother. Luckily hours of futuristic VR porn have cured him of that pesky bout of transphobia, and his own dalliance with omnipotence has provided him with valuable insight as to the human condition.

Cline muses, in full Jordan Peterson gets an Oculus Quest mode: Human beings were never meant to participate in a worldwide social network comprised [sic] of billions of people. We were designed by evolution to be hunter-gatherers, with the mental capacity to interact and socialize with the other members of our tribea tribe made up of a few hundred other people at most. Like so much of Clines writing, this is cheap introspection disguised as trenchant insight.

Maybe the freshman seminar-level Big Ideas of this book will make more sense when Steven Spielberg or whoever inevitably turns it into another expensive action-movie pastiche. The Ready Player One movie grossed nearly $600 million, and an adaptation of Ready Player Two cant be far behind. This book is criticism-proof; the people who ate it up the first time are just going to gorge on it again. They didnt even bother to send out advance copies for review.

When I finished reading it, I felt physically drained, exhausted after living in Ernest Clines head for nearly 400 pages of Animotion and Van Hagar, John Hughes movies and bad video games. I needed a break from the constant clanging drone of coin-op nostalgia. I stumbled outside to get some fresh air. Like Depeche Mode, I enjoyed the silence.

Read more here:
Ready Player Two Book Review - Book and Film Globe

Nobel laureate Milton Friedman once said that One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. When it comes to the $15 minimum wage hike supported by Joe Biden and many of his fellow Democrats, its becoming increasingly clear that the results will be ugly.

New reporting reveals that Chief Financial Officers at top American companies are considering raising prices, cutting workers hours and investing in automation to offset a potential rise in labor costs.

Companies including Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc., Potbelly Corp. and Texas Roadhouse Inc. are already doing the math to assess what a higher federal minimum wage could mean for their operations and cost base, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Some executives fear that increases to the federal pay floor would drive up wages across income classes, hurting profits and forcing businesses to find savings to offset higher spending on labor, the paper continues.

First and foremost, we can expect businesses to respond to artificially-high wage mandates by cutting jobs and reducing employee hours.

Why?This new reporting is bad news for low-skilled workersthe very group that a $15 minimum wage is supposed to help.

Well, labor is a product like any other. If the cost of soda was artificially mandated at $10 per can by the government, the simple fact is that consumers would buy less of it. When employers are legally forced to pay more for labor than it is worth in the market, they naturally and inevitably do the same.

By the simplest and most basic economics, a price artificially raised tends to cause more to be supplied and less to be demanded than when prices are left to be determined by supply and demand in a free market, famed economist Thomas Sowell wrote in Basic Economics. The result is a surplus, whether the price that is set artificially high is that of farm produce or labor.

Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, Sowell concluded. And that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage."

Ample evidence confirms these theoretical predictions.

For example, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that enacting a $15 minimum wage nationwide would destroy from 1.3 to 3.7 million jobs. Similarly, analysis from the Employment Policies Institute concludes that a federal $15 minimum wage would kill 2 million jobs.

These studies arent outliers. A research review by the Cato Institute concluded, The main finding of economic theory and empirical research over the past 70 years is that minimum wage increases tend to reduce employment.

So, its fair to assume that the warnings CFOs are offering about potential slashes in employment can be extrapolated beyond their specific companies. Proponents of a $15 minimum wage might intend to help workers, but they will inevitably and invariably put millions of them out of work altogether if their efforts are successful.

Meanwhile, other companies told the Journal they would pass the costs onto consumers by hiking prices. (Is that a win for the working class?)

And in an another twist, some companies said they would seek additional opportunities to invest in automation and eliminate their demand for labor altogether in lieu of paying mandated wages that far exceed a workers value.Lets hope that Joe Bidens minimum wage fantasies never become lawor workers will pay the price for his naivet.

Pool Corp., a distributor of swimming pool supplies, plans to ramp up investments in technology to offset the potential rise in labor costs, the Journal reports. The company would look to reduce manual processes such as product orders and certain warehouse operations.

[Automation is] the most significant investment that we can make...when it comes to lowering the impact of potentially higher labor costs down the road, Pool Corp CFO Mark Joslin said.

All of this is bad, bad news for workers. You know, the group that a $15 minimum wage is supposed to help.

So, lets hope that Joe Bidens minimum wage fantasies never become lawor workers will pay the price for his naivet.

Visit link:
Companies Are Preparing to Cut Jobs and Automate if Biden Gets $15 Minimum Wage Hike, Reporting Shows | Brad Polumbo - Foundation for Economic...

Lights, colours, and fireworks may not light up in profusion in the skies this year on Diwali due to the coronavirus pandemic, but the low-key, virtual celebrations that have been planned will be just as beautiful.

Most Diwali celebrations will be done virtually this year

Celebrities, founders, chefs, and entrepreneurs have different ways to celebrate Diwali this year.

Children are adapting to the concept of online learning

The entire education industry has been in a dilemma as to whether or not schools should be opened. Although there are advisories to restart classes, when it comes to our little ones, there is no room for any risk. The good news: youngsters are learning how to manage within the framework of the new normal and are doing their best to study with their virtual lessons.

Timeless fashion classics will always be popular during the festive season

Despite the fact that we are planning virtual meet-ups with family and friends amid the pandemic, the need for a festive range of clothes is always top priority during the festivals.

Make smart investments on auspicious occasions

Its that time of the year again when people flock to the stores to buy some yellow metal to add a touch of auspiciousness to Diwali. However, is buying physical gold still a feasible option?

Breakfast is the new lunch for intermittent fasters

As intermittent fasting becomes more popular, the first meal of your day must be healthy and wholesome.

This practice of two meals a day can actually help your body recover from chronic diseases. What matters is that you stay on course with food, sleep, and a healthy lifestyle.

Rajat Jadhav

Are your favourite writers Nicholas Taleb, Herman Hesse, Jordan Peterson and Matt Talibi? Is your hero of fiction James Bond? Is your dream journey a trek through Spiti Valley?

As for his motto, Put blinders on and keep going through hard times, he believes is the best way to conquer challenges and work towards a brilliant future.

Dont miss reading all about Rajat's greatest loves, hates, regrets, treasures, and more in his responses to our Proust Questionnaire.

More here:
Best of Weekender: India is finding light in the darkness with simple, small-scale celebrations this Diwali - YourStory

For the 102 English people aboard the Mayflower, this very week four centuries ago was one they would never forget.

After more than 65 days on a perilous, storm-tossed journey at sea, they sighted land (Cape Cod) on November 9, 1620. They dropped anchor on November 11. In between, they produced a document to establish what historian Rebecca Fraser describes as the first experiment in consensual government in Western history between individuals with one another, and not with a monarch.

We recognize that 200-word statement today as the Mayflower Compact. Its quadricentennial should be noted and appreciated by freedom-lovers everywhere.

Frasers observation is an important one. Previous statements and declarations in which freedom was a factor were agreements between an aggrieved people and the king or queen who ruled them. Magna Carta, for example, created a new relationship between English nobles and King John in 1215.

The Mayflower Compact, however, had nothing directly to do with the State. It was a private contract between the men among the Pilgrims and the men among the other half of the passengers, called strangers by the Pilgrims because they were placed on the ship by the sponsors in Britain to provide necessary skills to help the new colony succeed.

During the voyage, tensions between the Pilgrims and the strangers grew. When storms blew the ship off course and it became obvious they would land well north of Virginia, the strangers nearly mutinied. They argued that the wrong destination voided their agreement to assist the colony.

Compelled by circumstances (survival hung in the balance) to settle the issue one way or another, the passengers did the adult and civil thing. They put in writing a promise to each other to form a government of consent. Its laws would bind them all without religious or political discrimination. True to the longstanding customs of the day, women could not sign such a legal document but no evidence exists to suggest that if they could, they would have rejected it.

This short video from PBS provides some context:

Philosophers debate the legitimacy of the idea of a social contract. It is routinely taught in school these days that we are all bound by one, and that it demands our subservience to government. Personally, I cannot recall ever receiving my copy, let alone signing it. But if such a thing truly exists, the Mayflower Compact surely comes closest to its ideal. No one on the ship was compelled to sign, and the few who chose not to were either too ill to do so or were sailors intending to return to England.

Nathaniel Philbricks bestseller, Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War, expounds on the Compacts significance:

What made the document truly extraordinary was that it applied to a group of people who were three thousand miles from their mother country. The physical reality of all that spaceand all the terror, freedom and insularity it fosteredinformed everything that occurred in the days and years ahead.

In the end, the Mayflower Compact represented a remarkable act of coolheaded and pragmatic resolve[T]hey put pen to paper and created a document that ranks with the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution as a seminal American text.

The passengers then elected a Governor and went ashore on November 11. A month later, after some exploration, they opted to sail west to set up their permanent home, which they named Plymouth. Fortuitously, if not miraculously, friendly Indians whose names we should honorMassasoit and Squanto in particularhelped the colony get through rough times. And the colonists learned an important lesson in economics early on when they rejected the starvation policy of communal socialism and embraced private property.

Personally, I love this story because it is so quintessentially American, so sublimely pro-liberty. Why? Let me summarize:

The Pilgrims fled religious persecution at the hands of a government. They made a deal with investors to privately finance a new settlement across the ocean. Half of the passengers on their ship did not share their religious views but together, the Pilgrims and the strangers put their differences aside and signed a social contract to establish a secular self-government. Then they made a peace with the local tribes that lasted half a century. They succeeded and prospered when freedom of enterprise and personal initiative formed the central bedrock of their new society.

In 1776, the American Declaration of Independence asserted that all men are created equal and that to secure their unalienable rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

To Americans who remembered the Mayflower Compact, this was a glorious echo from a century and a half before.

It is no exaggeration to say that the great American experimentthe achievement of self-government, rule of law and enlightened liberty for allbegan not in 1776 but in 1620. We are still on that same voyage and though occasional storms block and even set us back, we remain committed to the ideal.

That, I believe, is what it really means to be an American.

Text of Mayflower Compact

Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War by Nathaniel Philbrick

The Mayflower: The Families, the Voyage, and the Founding of America by Rebecca Fraser

Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1645 by William Bradford

America Wasnt Founded on Slavery in 1619, But on Pilgrims Ideals Written in 1620 by Peter W. Wood

Remembering Warwick Charlton, Builder of Mayflower II by Lawrence W. Reed

Why the Pilgrims Abandoned Common Ownership for Private Propertyby Lawrence W. Reed

How the Mayflower Compact Laid a Foundation for American Democracy by Sarah Pruitt

1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project by Peter W. Wood

See the article here:
The Mayflower Compact: As an Idea, America Began in 1620, Not 1776 - Foundation for Economic Education