Mediaboss Marketing

By Jackson Elliott, Contributor Follow | Wednesday, October 21, 2020 Jordan Peterson speaks in a video to his supporters that was posted to YouTube on Oct. 19, 2020. | Jordan Peterson/YouTube

Jordan Peterson spoke of God's grace and mercy in his first public communication with his fans on Monday after a year spent largely out of public view as he sought treatment for an addiction to a prescribed medication.

Peterson posted theeight-minute video on his YouTube channel and in it, his cheeks appear more hollow than in his last video. He also spoke more slowly than usual but remained clear and coherent. His voice filled with emotion when he spoke about his friends and family supporting him.

My extended family and friends went above and beyond the call of duty in my estimation, he said in the video. Im certainly not convinced that I would have the character to provide to any one of them what they provided to me. That was a humbling lesson.

In his online lectures, Peterson has shown many people that the Bible contains relevant truths on living a meaningful life. With over 3 million YouTube subscribers from around the world, the soft-spoken psychology professor from Toronto, Canada, is one of the most influential intellectuals in public life today. Commenters on his videos often thank him for pointing them toward God.

Peterson said he plans to write a series of lectures on the book of Exodus and a video series devoted to the book of Proverbs.

Join over 250,000 others to get the top stories curated daily, plus special offers!

Join over 250,000 others to get the top stories curated daily, plus special offers!

Youve all heard, no doubt, that wisdom is proverbial or theres such a thing as proverbial wisdom. That phrase stems from the book of Proverbs, he said. I think the analysis of those will prove of benefit to me and perhaps to those of you who are inclined to watch or listen to my analysis.

Petersons approach to the Bible doesnt concern itself as much with whether Bible stories are literally true as it does with whether they are metaphorically true. Although he has refused to say whether he believes Jesus rose bodily from the dead, Peterson often tells listeners that goodness overcoming death is an important concept that gives people meaning to live by. The facts dont matter to him so much as the story.

Peterson himself is famously reticent to answer whether he believes in a personal God or is a Christian. When asked by interviewers whether hes a Christian, he said that as a Westerner he was conditioned and influenced by Christian moral teaching. On other occasions, he said he cannot say he believes in God because, he contends, anyone who truly believed in God would live a morally perfect life, and he doesnt.

I try to act as if God exists, because God only knows what youd be if you truly believed, he said in an interview with Prager University in May 2019.

Despite Petersons past statements about his belief in God, he declared that With Gods grace and mercy, Ill be starting to create original material once again.

Peterson visited hospitals around the world searching for a cure after he developed a physical addiction to the medicine he was taking to fix a severe autoimmune reaction to food. The dosage he was prescribed was reportedly increased to help his anxiety after his wife was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2019. The medicine also had the unusual effect of doing the opposite of what it normally does, he said.

While fighting the addiction and autoimmune disorders in the hospital, Peterson experienced terrible withdrawal symptoms, including a restlessness so severe that he wanted to kill himself.

Ive been suffering from impaired health, he said in the video. Severely impaired health, as a consequence of benzodiazepine use for anxiety, or more accurately from a combination of using that medication and then ceasing its use once I realized it was dangerous.

Peterson ended his video by thanking his fans and YouTube subscribers for their continued support.

Thank you very much, and thank you very much is probably sufficient, he said.

Join over 250,000 others to get the top stories curated daily, plus special offers!

Join over 250,000 others to get the top stories curated daily, plus special offers!

Read more:
Jordan Peterson tells fans he's thankful for 'Gods grace ...

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.

cnxps.cmd.push(function () { cnxps({ playerId: '36af7c51-0caf-4741-9824-2c941fc6c17b' }).render('4c4d856e0e6f4e3d808bbc1715e132f6'); });

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