"The Aristocracy of Talent" Review

…Wooldridge calls for private schools to offer half their places to poorer students and advocates the creation of a “highly variegated” school system consisting of technical and art schools as well as academically selective ones. He also says we need a “moral revival” in our values to counteract our society’s obsessive celebration of intelligence. He points out that many members of the cognitive elite (such as bankers and journalists) are generally despised by the ordinary public, who revere the caring professions instead….

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Georgia Football: Team "Connection"

In the business world, a company may hold a corporate retreat for employees for team building in hopes of producing better results.

The Georgia football team turned inward for players to get to know the guy across from them in the locker room or the person who they lined up besides or against on the practice field.

Skull sessions, they called them. It started last winter after an 8-2 season in which Georgia failed to win the SEC East for the first time since 2016 and the pandemic altered usual player interactions.

For three days a week, players met in small groups for as long as 20 to 25 minutes. They were held after weight lifting sessions. Coach Kirby Smart moved from meeting to meeting and assistant coaches rotated.

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Self-Reform is Missing

Being in the flow with a partner is a great experience, but society undermines partnership by inflaming its dominate-or-submit culture. The Democratic and Republican parties reinforce these divisive tendencies. Undoing deeply embedded social conditioning and nurturing compassionate cooperation throughout society will require sustained effort and mutual support.

With true partners, you care for the other as much as you care for yourself. The more they benefit, the more you benefit. You listen, learn, understand, and respect each other. You make decisions together, as equals, perhaps switching roles and delegating responsibilities. You’re a team. No one dominates or considers themselves to be a superior human being.

Tight-knit teams flourish at work and school, in sports, with music and the arts, and in community organizations. Members cooperate to achieve collective goals. Whole nations unite to solve problems or deal with catastrophes. Study group members teach one another. Sports team members inspire each other. Highly skilled musicians improvise, taking the group to new territory. Every member is important. Team spirit elevates performance. Throughout society, while accepting justified social control, strong individuals and strong communities cultivate empowerment.

Unfortunately, however, Americans (as is the case with humans in general) have an arrogance problem.

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Globalization and the Myth of Human Races

By Hector E. Garcia

At the core of the nation’s current socio-political conditions are two underlying challenges, both have been intensified by this stage of globalization but were present before it began with the fall of the Soviet Union. One can be addressed rationally and objectively; it is the growth of inequality in wealth and income… The other challenge compounds the first one unnecessarily… It could be simpler than the first because it draws power from a centuries' old myth that was debunked by DNA science in 2002: the classification of human races, which assumes a hierarchy of moral and intellectual aptitudes related to color of skin, geographical origin and language.

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The Foreign Policy Conversation Washington Doesn’t Want to Have

Interview with Robert Wright

So I wanted to have a foreign policy conversation that I’m not hearing with someone who stands outside of and critiques the Washington consensus on these issues. Robert Wright is a journalist and an author. He’s the founder of one of the great enduring institutions of the blogosphere, bloggingheads.tv. He writes on science, and religion, and human cooperation, and foreign policy — particularly foreign policy — in his excellent newsletter Nonzero. I’m a subscriber to that. I urge you to be one too.

In Nonzero, he really routinely examines the assumptions that drive America’s foreign policy conversation, the interest groups that drive it, the kind of collective social dynamics of what he and others call the blob, which is the Washington foreign policy establishment. And that’s what I wanted to talk to him about — the ideas about American power that get taken for granted, the history of failure and blowback that we often ignore, and the lessons we need to learn.

Our reckoning with not just the harm we have done, but I want to say this clearly — with the good we could achieve, the good we could do is long overdue.

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Housing Growth: Ezra Klein Intervew

Annie Galvin

So one more question that relates to the environment. Alyssa asks, “How do you reconcile the need to build more housing for people with catastrophic biodiversity loss” that might come along with that effort to build?

Ezra Klein

So I don’t think those are in tension, really. A lot of the pressure to build more housing comes from people who want to see dense places zoned so you can build up. And I don’t think it’s the case that if we just made it easier to add stories to buildings in San Francisco, you would have any more biodiversity loss. The biodiversity in San Francisco proper is — it’s already pretty lost.

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Growth and Consumption: Ezra Klein Interview

Ezra Klein Interview

Annie Galvin
…Simon has a really interesting question: “What does think of Jason Hickel’s argument that degrowth is humanity’s best hope for addressing climate change?” So maybe could you just quickly gloss what degrowth is, and then give your opinion on it?

Ezra Klein

Yeah. And maybe we should do an episode on this. I have very complicated feelings about degrowth. So one is that it is tricky to talk about, as you say, because I find its advocates will continue to say that you’re defining it wrong. So let me use a definition from Hickel, which is, and I’m quoting him here, “Degrowth is a planned reduction of energy and resource throughput designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being.”

And so I’d note two things here. One is “designed.” Degrowth is, as its advocates understand it, a act of global economic planning really without equal anywhere in human history. It is an act of extraordinary central planning. So that’s one thing that is going to become important in my answer.

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Personal Rapid Transportation: Multipurpose Renovation

By John Sanger

Before the Industrial Age reached its zenith, it exerted one more impact on rural America; loss of transportation options. Fifty years ago there was bus, plane and rail service from regional centers and even many small towns throughout the country, today almost all of that has disappeared. Only the automobile remains and it is subject to the vagaries of weather and other interruptions. For a rural based teleworker that needs to have time-dependent, reliable and fast access to their employer, this poses another challenge to the decision to move to a rural community and to help rebuild their demographics. The Smart Region.US concept selects Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) to fill this void.

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American Corruption

By Larry Walker

Self-serving, dishonest, unethical, illegal, full-blown corruption fuels the System — publicly, right before our eyes. We’ve seen the headlines, the articles, the statistics — and seem to “sigh and turn away” as it has all become “normal.”

Here’s a list of past and current actions that would be less acceptable if only we labeled them as corrupt. You could add more. The longer the list, the greater the need for reform.

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Cultivating a Moral America

Imagine a moral America. Americans treat each other as they want to be treated and respect everyone’s equal value. If you live elsewhere, imagine the same for your country.

We love our country, live good, compassionate lives, care for others as we care for ourselves, avoid both selfishness and self-sacrifice, improve ourselves and the world, are politically engaged, work to undo racism and all forms of oppressive domination, and nurture partnerships throughout society.

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Nonprofit Partnerships

Effective structures, a commitment to honor them, and mutual support for self-development can help nonprofit organizations cultivate productive partnerships. Members/clients can be partners with each other and with staff. Staff can be partners with each other, with members/clients, and with the governing board. Governing board members can be partners with each other and with staff.

In these ways, housing programs, community centers, activist organizations, faith communities, rehab centers, schools, and other nonprofits with a regular membership/client base can nurture self- and community empowerment — and serve as models for holistic and systemic transformation rooted in democratic hierarchies.

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Dialog with Harry C. Boyte

In August, 2021 Harry C. Boyte posted the following on Academia.edu and asked for feedback. Our exchange follows:

Background paper for “Tomorrow’s City Manager,” a session at the 2021 ICMA conference, October 3-6, 2021

Beyond the Vending Machine

Citizen professionals as agents and architects of a productive democracy

Harry C. Boyte, Institute for Public Life and Work, Augsburg University

Revitalizing the legacy of public work

The recently released United Nations report on climate, which UN Secretary-General António Guterres calls a “code red for humanity,” is a signature for the epoch. Climate change joins with Covid, polarization, rising inequality, intensifying bigotries, loneliness, and other vastly complex problems. No government can fix these by itself. Even to ameliorate them requires tapping energies and talents of diverse groups and generating widespread civic activation and civic responsibility.

To meet such challenges, we need what my colleagues and I call “public work,” effort by a diverse mix of people who work across lines of differences – partisan, racial, economic, religious and other -- to solve public problems and create our commonwealth. Here, the public work of the New Deal era is especially instructive.

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