…the story of my life.
And I don’t even have an accent, so what’s my excuse?
I’ve noticed that, in general, voice recognition systems don’t like me. Back when my arm injuries were very bad, I tried to use Dragon Dictate, and it had a dreadful time understanding my voice. And yet actual people seem to have no problem comprehending me, and when I hear a recording of myself speaking I don’t hear any lack of ability to articulate properly. What gives?
Now that Obamacare has been in operation for a while, and even though the government can’t seem to manage to tell us the demographics of the enrollees, some relevant data is nevertheless starting to roll in. So far the news on prescriptions is not good:
Express Scripts, a large Pharmacy Benefit Management company that, so far as I know, has no axe to grind either in favor or opposition to the ACA, has published a report indicating that, at least so far, costs per member on the Exchanges are 35% higher than they are for commercial policies off the Exchanges. The study is based on a national sample of more than 650,000 pharmacy claims (423,000 covered lives) for the first two months of 2014 for patients enrolled in an Exchange policy with with pharmacy benefit coverage administered by Express Scripts. The analysis compared these pharmacy claims to those from commercial health plans, with pharmacy coverage administered by Express Scripts, during the same time period.
According to data from the government’s own Actuarial Value Calculator, pharmaceutical expenses comprise about 21% of total healthcare expenses. Having to pay 35% more for such expenses is thus significant in and of itself. But peer-reviewed scholarly research such as that summarized and extended here indicates that pharmaceutical claims correlate positively with overall healthcare expenses. The higher pharmaceutical claims may just be the tip of the iceberg.
It makes sense. Of course, perhaps the initial enrollees were the people who just couldn’t wait for Obamacare, and what we’re seeing is their pent-up demand unleashed. Perhaps later enrollees will be healthier. But meanwhile, a 35% increase represents quite a chunk of change.
Our demagogue of a race-baiting community-organizer president has this to say about Republican efforts at promoting voter ID [emphasis mine]:
President Barack Obama struck hard at restrictive voting rights laws Friday, calling them a Republican political tactic conceived to address a made-up problem.
Pretending that there’s widespread impropriety, he said, is just about keeping Democrats from winning.
“The real voter fraud is people who try to deny our rights by making bogus arguments about voter fraud,” Obama said, in a speech to Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network in New York – an organization that he said should serve as a national model for organizing people around voting, led by a man who deserved “a big round of applause.”
The voting rights argument is a key element of the White House’s strategy to have the president focus on boosting base turnout for the midterms, especially among core Obama voters.
“There are well-organized and well-funded efforts to undo [the] gains” of the civil rights movement, Obama told the largely African-American crowd. “Just as inequality feeds on justice, opportunity requires justice, and justice requires the right to vote.”
Not content to argue the merits of whether there’s enough voter fraud to warrant efforts at voter ID laws, or whether voter ID laws actually constitute enough of a stumbling block to hamper a significant number of voters, minority or otherwise, Obama is willing—nay, eager—to couch the issue in the most divisive and partisan way.
What he’s actually saying is that the Republicans are lying. Not only lying, but lying in order to disinfranchise black people and reverse the gains of the civil rights movement. Put that way, it’s almost breath-taking in its divisive demonizing of the opposition, divisive in a way that I cannot recall any other president, Democrat or Republican, approaching.
Oh, and a corollary of what Obama is saying is that Al Sharpton (race-baiter and proven liar extraordinaire), is a man who deserves a big round of applause.
Another thing on which to meditate—this is the same Barack Obama who first made his name on the national level by saying at the Democratic Convention of 2004:
Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America””there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.
That’s the same Barack Obama who sat for twenty years in the racist and anti-American church of Reverend Jeremiah Wright and saw no evil, heard no evil.
As for voter fraud, who on earth doesn’t think it exists? We can argue about its extent, but there is no question that the phenomenon occurs, and that documented cases represent some fraction of the whole (see also this and this), whether it’s the tip of a large iceberg or of something far smaller. There is also little question that, in this day and age, requiring some sort of voter ID is not an especially onerous burden, and that the vast majority of the American people understand that and support it.
Although the article is somewhat murky, it appears to be saying that Flight 370’s co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid switched his cell phone on and tried to make a call as the plane was flying low and off-course, moments before it disappeared from radar, and that authorities know to whom it was made:
It is understood that the aircraft…was flying at an altitude low enough for the nearest telecommunications tower to pick up his phone’s signal.
His call, however, ended abruptly, but not before contact was established with a telecommunications sub-station in the state.
However, the NST is unable to ascertain who Fariq was trying to call as sources chose not to divulge details of the investigation. The links that police are trying to establish are also unclear.
They think it was cut off because the plane moved away from the tower.
So we have the following questions: As with all reports connected with Flight 370, the first question is whether the report is accurate. The second is what authorities know that they’re not telling us. The third is what it all signifies. And the fourth is whether we’ll ever know much more about what happened on Flight 370.
I think the answer to that last one is “Yes, but it probably will take years.”
[Hat tip: John Hinderaker at Powerline.]
This.
Used to be, long ago, Americans would have rejected this sort of whining. But in the Obama administration it’s become standard. Blame, blame, blame others, and always declare or at least imply that the criticism one receives is due to race.
This has been the most divisive, whining, blaming administration in history, in addition to all its other flaws. And this modus operandi was foreshadowed even before Obama was elected. In fact, it’s part of how he got elected. During the 2008 campaign, Obama not only cynically played the race card, but he played it preemptively:
At a fund-raiser in Jacksonville, Fl….Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said he expects Republicans to inject race into the campaign…:
Obama “The choice is clear. Most of all we can choose between hope and fear. It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy. We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”
Republicans hadn’t mentioned it and weren’t going to mention it (or even, for the most part, think it). There were plenty of other reasons to disagree with Obama and want him defeated. But Obama managed to finesse his opposition by implying that Republicans would either say it or think it, and that criticism of him was racism de facto if not de jure.
For example, “He’s young and inexperienced” was merely simple, obvious fact. But note how cleverly Obama linked it with accusations of a racist agenda on the part of his opponents. And his supporters and associates (including Eric Holder) have taken that ball and run with it very, very far.
Well, I’m not quite sure what to say about this, except that I had no idea who Nick Jonas was before I looked him up. And that at least he won’t trip on his shoelaces:
Elia Kazan was a great director, especially according to many of the actors who worked with him and from whom he coaxed (or tricked, or bullied, or squeezed) their best performances. But he was an exceptionally polarizing figure in Hollywood because of his testimony for HUAC, when he named names and earned lifelong enmity from the left.
Why did he do it [emphasis mine]?:
When [Kazan] was in his mid 20s, during the Depression years 1934 to 1936, he had been a member of the American Communist Party in New York, for a year and a half.
In April 1952, the Committee called on Kazan, under oath, to identify Communists from that period 16 years earlier. Kazan initially refused to provide names, but eventually named eight former Group Theater members who he said had been Communists…All the persons named were already known to HUAC, however. The move cost Kazan many friends within the film industry, including playwright Arthur Miller…
In later interviews, Kazan explained some of the early events that made him decide to become a friendly witness, most notably in relation to the Group Theater, which he called his first “family,” and the “best thing professionally” that ever happened to him:
“The Group Theatre said that we shouldn’t be committed to any fixed political program set by other people outside the organisation. I was behaving treacherously to the Group when I met downtown at CP [Communist Party] headquarters, to decide among the Communists what we should do in the Group, and then come back and present a united front, pretending we had not been in caucus…
“I was tried by the Party and that was one of the reasons I became so embittered later. The trial was on the issue of my refusal to follow instructions, that we should strike in the Group Theatre, and insist that the membership have control of its organisation. I said it was an artistic organisation, and I backed up Clurman and Strasberg who were not Communists… The trial left an indelible impression on me… Everybody else voted against me and they stigmatised me and condemned my acts and attitude. They were asking for confession and self-humbling. I went home that night and told my wife “I am resigning.” But for years after I resigned, I was still faithful to their way of thinking. I still believed in it. But not in the American Communists. I used to make a difference and think: “These people here are damned fools but in Russia they have got the real thing,” until I learned about the Hitler-Stalin pact, and gave up on the USSR.”
Mills notes that prior to becoming a “friendly witness,” Kazan discussed the issues with [Arthur] Miller:
“To defend a secrecy I don’t think right and to defend people who have already been named or soon would be by someone else… I hate the Communists and have for many years, and don’t feel right about giving up my career to defend them. I will give up my film career if it is in the interests of defending something I believe in, but not this.”
Miller put his arm around Kazan and retorted, “don’t worry about what I’ll think. Whatever you do is okay with me, because I know that your heart is in the right place.”
Kazan had personal experience of what the Party was capable of when they read him the riot act for his lack of obedience, and demanded he say his mea culpas. When no one stood up for him he understood that loyalty among this group was only to the Party; people were expendable. Why should he risk himself for a group like that (not to mention what he learned about Stalinism later)?
Kazan’s conscience was at peace with his decision [emphasis mine]:
[Kazan’s] controversial stand during his testimony in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1952, became the low point in his career, although he remained convinced that he made the right decision to give the names of Communist Party members. He stated in an interview in 1976:
“I would rather do what I did than crawl in front of a ritualistic Left and lie the way those other comrades did, and betray my own soul. I didn’t betray it. I made a difficult decision.”
Of course the Left, in its usual Orwellian inversion, considered what he did a betrayal. But before he betrayed them, they—and Communism itself—had betrayed him. That version of the story goes, of course, against the usual leftist meme that Kazan had “betrayed old friends” versus “behaving with silent honor” by keeping his mouth shut.
In the Guardian piece I just linked, David Thomson writes that in Kazan’s autobiography (which I haven’t read) “you will feel his agony, you will hear of the old friends who never spoke to him again, and you realise how Kazan was haunted by the incident as long as he lived.” One implication is that he caved to pressure and that his conscience troubled him. He may have caved to pressure, but I don’t think it was his conscience that troubled him at all. It was the realization that his erstwhile friends would ostracize him, as many of them did—including Arthur Miller, who (despite his supposed promise otherwise) didn’t speak to him again for twelve years, and only reconciled due to the peacemaking efforts of Marilyn Monroe, who earlier in her life (before her marriage to Miller) had had affairs with both men.
The fact that Kazan was unrepentant about his HUAC testimony may have stung even more than the testimony itself. Just as his earlier “trial” at the hands of the Party had contained a prescription for his recantation and repentance, so did the later condemnation of Kazan for his HUAC testimony contain the need that he apologize. Far from doing so, he had actually taken out “a full-page ad in the NY Times justifying himself” after his testimony, and never retreated from that position.
Earlier, Kazan had betrayed himself and his friends at the Group Theater for the sake of the Party when he had first joined and reported to the Party secretly on the Group’s doings, and then gotten kicked in the teeth by the Party for his pains. He was not interested in betraying himself for the Party again, even if it meant telling the truth about the Communist affiliations of some friends.
[NOTE: All of the people Kazan named were not only already known to HUAC, but had also been members of the Group Theater and the Party at the same time he had been, back in the 30s. I assume it likely that they had been among those who had voted for his censure back in the 30s, as well as having joined him then in betraying the Group Theater by reporting secretly to the Party about its doings and supporting Party takeover of the Group. So his HUAC testimony may have been a form of payback as well.
If you’re interested in the text of Kazan’s post-HUAC-testimony NY Times ad, you can find it here. An excerpt:
I joined the Communist Party late in the summer of 1934. I got out a year and a half later.
I have no spy stories to tell, because I saw no spies. Nor did I understand, at that time, any opposition between American and Russian national interest. It was not even clear to me in 1936, that the American Communist Party was abjectly taking its orders from the Kremlin.
What I learned was the minimum that anyone must learn who puts his head into the noose of party “discipline.” The Communists automatically violated the daily practices of democracy to which I was accustomed. They attempted to control thought and to suppress personal opinion. They tried to dictate personal conduct. They habitually distorted and disregarded and violated the truth. All this was crudely opposite of their claims of “democracy” and “the scientific approach.”
To be a member of the Communist Party is to have a taste of the police state. It is a diluted taste but it is bitter and unforgettable. It is diluted because you can walk out.
I got out in the spring of 1936.
The question will be asked why I did not tell this story sooner. I was held back, primarily, by concern for the reputations and employment of people who may, like myself, have left the party many years ago.
Firsthand experience of dictatorship and thought control left me with an abiding hatred of these. It left me with an abiding hatred of Communist philosophy and methods and the conviction that these must be resisted always.
It also left me with the passionate conviction that we must never let the Communists get away with the pretense that they stand for the very things which they kill in their own countries.
I can’t seem to find any information on the subject, but my hunch is that Kazan remained a Democrat and liberal for the rest of his life.]
Predictably, the articles about Kathleen Sebelius’ resignation vary depending on the politics of the author. Either she stepped down in shame or in triumph, the right saying the former and the left the latter for the most part (except, surprisingly, for Rachel Maddow and the NY Times).
Whatever their interpretation or spin on the subject, most people seem to have been surprised by it. I hadn’t thought much about it one way or the other, so I can’t say whether I was surprised or unsurprised. But I have long felt that it must have been incredibly hard for Sebelius to try to defend Obamacare or her part in it since the disastrous rollout last October. Sebelius’ public appearances have seemed like an exercise in public humiliation and obvious mendacity, which can’t be easy for anyone to go through except a psychopath.
We’ll probably never know what really happened, or exactly and precisely why. My guess is that (unless she is a psychopath) Sebelius is exhausted by the strain of it all, and now that she’s stayed the course to March 31 she wants out.
As Ben Domenech points out, her successor will probably face some strain, too, from Republicans—in the outside chance that they’re smart enough to exploit the situation:
In any case, it appears that this resignation presents Republicans with a golden opportunity to reignite their crusade against Obamacare with Sylvia Burwell’s nomination as a proxy for all the problems with the law. Burwell is a political loyalist and a veteran of the shutdown fight with no record on health care, and will likely be coached to avoid answering questions about specific challenges with implementation at HHS. Senate Republicans actually have an advantage here in the wake of the Nuclear Option’s implementation: they can easily come up with a list of facts they claim the administration has hidden, details kicked aside, statutes ignored, and a host of other challenging questions on accountability over the implementation (and non-implementation) of the law. A list of every question Sebelius has dodged over the past several years would suffice. By demanding answers before the HHS nomination moves forward and refusing to rubber stamp the president’s pick, Republicans could force more vulnerable Democrats to take a vote that ties them both to the Nuclear Option and Obamacare six months before a critical election.
I’m not at all sure the American people in general—rather than just political junkies—notice things like that. My reading of Sebelius’ resignation is just a gut feeling; I certainly have no inside info. As for Obama’s opinions on the matter, Sebelius was never really one of his trusted insiders (that list is a short one, with Valerie Jarrett, his wife Michelle, and Eric Holder heading it) and so he can take her or leave her. He probably feels even better about Sylvia Burwell at this point than he did about Sebelius, and he’s weathered much bigger Obamacare storms than her departure.
Arguing for the idea that Obama may have forced her out is the fact that (at least as I understand things) now that the filibuster is gone for executive appointees, a simple majority can confirm Burwell’s nomination. And, since the Democrats have that majority right now and I don’t think Burwell’s past contain any dealbreakers for Democrats in the Senate, I expect her to be confirmed. Obama may be afraid that after 2014, if the Republicans take control, that won’t be so easy to do. So better now than later.
Ed Rogers points out that for the most part the American public couldn’t care less about the Kochs. And yet the activist liberals and left keep hammering away at them. Why?:
…Democratic campaign managers are not crazy; there is no chance they really believe an anti-Koch message drives votes. But perhaps there is a method to their madness. There are two lines of thinking that might be driving their strange Koch brother-focused messaging. First is that the Democrats have nothing affirmative to talk about…
And second, it is possible Democrats are defaming the Kochs in hopes it will intimidate other possible Republican donors.
Of the two, the second is most important, IMHO. The revelations about the persecution of conservative groups by the IRS underscore how useful and vital the technique of intimidation is to the Democrats. Anything that slows down or discourages conservative fund-raising, organization, and communication with the public is golden.
But there’s a third—and I think very large—reason for the Koch demonization. Rogers has written “there is no chance they really believe an anti-Koch message drives votes,” but that’s only true if you look at the votes of moderates or Republicans. It most definitely could help drive votes on the left.
Winning elections is not just about getting moderates to vote for you, or even about undermining the voting drive of your opposition. It is also very much about energizing your own base to get out and vote. The Democratic base nowadays—the left—is motivated in no small part by a combination of self-righteousness and hateful rage. Anything that drives one or both of those emotions is a plus for the party. Stoking Koch-hatred performs that function.
I suppose many of you more tech-savvy than I am (which would probably include about 98% of you) already know about the Heartbleed encrypting bug. I’ve read a lot of conflicting information about whether to change your passwords in order to protect yourself, but this article seems to offer the best and most current advice, as of today.
It lists websites that have patched the bug already, and strongly suggests you change your passwords for those sites. Yahoo, for example, is one. Then it lists websites that never were vulnerable in the first place, such as Paypal.
I know people who refuse to do any sort of business online, but most of us have been lulled into it by the convenience of the whole thing. Plus, since so many businesses use computers themselves, I think people feel vulnerable (and perhaps rightly so) no matter what method they use to transact their affairs. The days of cash under the mattress and over the counter still exist, but for most of us they are long gone. We leave a trail wherever we go, not just on computers but on telephones and cameras, at tollbooths and with credit cards. The internet is just one aspect of that.
The behavior of Brandeis’ administration in withdrawing its honorary degree invitation from Hirsi Ali has drawn a great many accusations of cowardice. The word “craven” (which I used yesterday) comes to mind, and not just to my mind. Witness Bill Kristol, who has called the action a “craven capitulation” and pointed out that, in the recent past, Brandeis has had no trouble awarding honorary degrees to people such as Tony Kushner who’ve accused Israel of being guilty of ethnic cleansing and of causing “terrible peril in the world.”
Then there’s John Podhoretz, who in his Commentary piece eschews “craven” as a description of Brandeis’ president Fred Lawrence, preferring “gutless, spineless, simpering coward.”
But academic cowardice is nothing new in the face of threats from special interest groups the university either wants to placate or is afraid of, or both. Profiles in courage in academia have been few and far between, and principles? They’re malleable, mutable, and flexible enough to fit the practical necessities of pandering to the favored interest group du jour.
Which brings us to a little history lesson from the 60s, the epicenter of much that’s bad in academia, when trends that had been building for decades came to unfortunate fruition.
In previous posts of mine about Allan Bloom’s highly-recommended book The Closing of the American Mind, I’ve mentioned that one of the most riveting parts of the book is when Bloom describes the moral collapse of the faculty and administration of so many universities during the 60s, their abject and craven failure to defend their own principles, and their eager willingness to cave to threats and intimidation. I decided to publish a longish excerpt illustrating all of this, to whet your appetite for the book if you haven’t yet read it.
In the following excerpt Bloom is describing an incident that occurred when he was a faculty member at Cornell during the late 60s, when black militants with guns occupied a campus building and made demands. Bloom had gone to the university provost to speak up for a black student of his (unnamed in the book, but actually Alan Keyes—who happens, in a strange twist of fate, to have been the person Barack Obama soundly defeated in his 2004 US Senate race, when Keyes was put on the Republican ballot as a hasty substitute for Jack Ryan). Keyes had earlier been threatened by a black professor at Cornell for refusing to take part in a demonstration. Here’s what Bloom says transpired [emphasis mine]:
The provost was a former natural scientist, and he greeted me with a mournful countenance. He, of course, fully sympathized with the young man’s [Keyes’] plight. However, things were bad, and there was nothing he could do to stop such behavior in the black student association…He added that no university in the country could expel radical black students, or dismiss the faculty members who incited them, presumably because the students at large would not permit it.
…The provost had a mixture of cowardice and moralism not uncommon at the time. He did not want trouble. His president had frequently cited Clark Kerr’s dismissal at the University of California as the great danger…At the same time the provost thought he was engaged in a great moral work, righting the historic injustice done to blacks. He could justify to himself the humiliation he was undergoing as a necessary sacrifice. The case of this particular black student clearly bothered him. But he was both more frightened of the violence-threatening extremists and also more admiring of them. Obvious questions were no longer obvious. Why could not a black student be expelled as a white student would be if he failed his courses or disobeyed the rules that make university community possible? Why could the president not call the police if order was threatened? Any man of weight would have fired the professor who threatened the life of the student. The issue was not complicated. Only the casuistry of weakness and ideology made it so…No one who knew or cared about what a university is would have acquiesced in this travesty. It was no surprise that a few weeks later—immediately after the faculty had voted overwhelmingly under the gun to capitulate to outrageous demands that it had a few days earlier rejected—the leading members of the administration and many well-known faculty members rushed over to congratulate the gathered students and tried to win their approval. I saw exposed before all the world what had long been known, and it was at last possible without impropriety to tell these pseudo-universitarians precisely what one thought of them.
It was also no surprise that many of those professors who had been most eloquent in their sermons about the sanctity of the university, and who had presented themselves as its consciences, were among those who reacted, if not favorably, at least weakly to what was happening. They had made careers out of saying how badly the German professors [during the Nazi era] had reacted to violations of academic freedom. This was all light talk and mock heroics, because they had not measured the potential threats to the university nor assessed the doubtful grounds of academic freedom. Above all, they did not think that it could be assaulted from the Left or from within the university…These American professors were utterly disarmed, as were many German professors, when the constituency they took for granted, of which they honestly believed they were independent, deserted or turned against them…To fulminate against Bible Belt preachers was one thing. In the world that counted for these professors, this could only bring approval. But to be isolated in the university, to be called foul names by their students or their colleagues, all for the sake of an abstract idea, was too much for them. They were not in general strong men, although their easy rhetoric had persuaded them that they were—that they alone manned the walls protecting civilization. Their collapse was merely pitiful, although their feeble attempts at self-justification frequently turned vicious. In Germany the professors who kept quiet had the very good excuse that they could not do otherwise. Speaking up would have meant imprisonment or death. The law not only did not protect them but was their deadly enemy. At Cornell there was no such danger…There was essentially no risk in defending the integrity of the university, because the danger was entirely within it. All that was lacking was a professorial corps aware of the university’s purpose, and dedicated to it. That is what made the surrender so contemptible.
I’ll stop there, somewhat arbitrarily, because I could go on and on. Bloom himself goes on to discuss the curriculum “reforms” that gutted the universities; we all know where they have led.
Bloom resigned from Cornell and went on to teach at various other illustrious universities, ending his career with a lengthy stint at the University of Chicago. We know what happened to Keyes, who also left Cornell at about the same time (and went on to study at Harvard, becoming Bill Kristol’s roommate). And another professor at Cornell at the time, the brilliant Thomas Sowell (who apparently was the only black professor there when he was hired in 1965), has written his own account of the 1969 demonstration, entitled “The Day Cornell Died.”
I can’t tell a Stradivarius from a Curtin.
But neither, it seems, could a bunch of professional concert violinists:
There were 12 instruments, six old and six new, with new ones “antiqued” to appear older. The violinists, 10 professional soloists, had more time: 75 minutes in a rehearsal room and 75 minutes in a 300-seat concert hall, both in Paris. They used their own bows, compared the test violins with their own, and could choose to have a listener provide feedback, and to have a piano accompanist. At one point, an orchestra accompanied them; the results of that segment will be published in a later study.
Six soloists chose a new violin for a theoretical concert tour. One particular new violin, with a loud, assertive sound, was favored by four, perhaps because as soloists, they thought about projecting sound over an orchestra, researchers said. The soloists rated new violins higher, on average, for playability, articulation and projection. And their guesses of which violins were new or old were no better than chance.
However, old habits die hard:
Earl Carlyss, a longtime member of the Juilliard String Quartet, said subjectivity and individuality were key. “It isn’t just the instrument, it’s the player,” he said. “If you’re comfortable with an instrument, automatically it’s a plus, and the newer instruments, they respond easily.”
Nonetheless, he said, “I don’t know any great soloist who has a Strad or Guarneri who is trading it in for a new instrument.”
That makes sense. If a performer is confident in his/her instrument (whether it be a violin, a pair of shoes for a dancer, or a particular baseball bat for a player), he/she will probably do better.
By the way, although the sponsors of the study refuse to say which new violins were involved, new-violin manufacturer Curtin was one of the originators of the research, so I’m guessing that at least one Curtin violin was involved in the experiment (I’d guess that another might have been a Rhonheimer, the fungus-treated violin). Lest you think Curtin violins are going for a song (as it were), prices start at $40,000. Still that’s a whole lot cheaper than a Strad.
[Hat tip: Instapundit.]