Bits and pieces of ideas.

I love my house. Some how it is very balanced and beautiful. But it is not the house that makes me happy but the people who come through the front door. A parade of beauty, youth, ambition, and energy, students are wonderful.

Picking out literature for choirs is difficult. It is the most important thing a director can do and yet publishers do not make it easy to find good stuff. Publishers barely discriminate between great stuff and banal pablum. They publish 20 times more pablum than great stuff and you have to sift through to find beauty. Why do they feel they have to have a stable of composers and drive them to publish? Just because he/she wrote a winner five years ago doesn't mean that he/she can write 10 winners a year to make your publishing company fat. There aren't that many Mozart's and Bach's out there, thank you very much.

Emotion or logic. Bush or Kerry? In a way. If we trust our emotions to make all our decisions we may find ourselves with at least temporary fascism, or perhaps just fascism. The preznit is pushing us that way. There is a terrific article in the Huffington Post by Marty Kaplan, a professor at USC Annenberg.

He begins:

Americans are stupid about risk, me included. It's nuts to fear plane crashes more than car crashes; loopy to be more afraid of online sexual predators than of lightning; irrational to pay more attention to shark attacks than to climate change. Doubtless there's something about our lizard brain stems that accounts for our poor choices in boogeymen, and thus for the media's pandering to our catastrophilia. But no vestigial pathway in our panic-hardwiring is an excuse for the Bush administration's current ramping up of its shameless exploitation of our fears.

Each of the 95 times President Bush mentioned Al Qaeda in his South Carolina speech last week, and each of the innumerable times in coming days that his disciplined minions will push the Iraq-is-about-Al-Qaeda button, the real message is, of course, 9/11. If we don't win in Iraq, the Bush case goes, the terrorists will kill you and your children in the air, at the mall and in your bed.
Set aside for a moment the baldfaced Bush lie that Al Qaeda accounts for more than a sliver of the terrorism in Iraq. Ignore the convenient Bush amnesia of the cause for Al Qaeda's presence in Mesopotamia: his own invasion-of-choice. Forget the absurdity of fight-them-there-so-they-won't-fight-us-here: a defeat of Al Qaeda in Iraq, even if it were militarily and politically possible, even if we were willing to spill all the blood and spend all the treasure required to accomplish it, will not cause the cells of terrorists already in America to disband, nor will it so bum, depress or demoralize the ferocious jihadists already plotting against us in encampments and networks around the world that they will abandon their zeal for revenge and seek new careers in hedge fund management or search engine design.


I challenge you to read the whole article.