May 18 through June 23, 2012

Marc Foxx

Morning in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Reports have been rising of coyotes following dog owners and approaching unleashed dogs in the park.

By NORIMITSU ONISHI
NY Times Published: May 14, 2012

SAN FRANCISCO — Almost all creatures, great and small, are welcome in the city of St. Francis, patron saint of animals, whose spirit imbues this place with a love and regard for our nonhuman friends. Take just one example gleaned from census and city data: Dogs outnumber children here, making already assertive dog owners an even more formidable political force.

Officials have posted signs to alert park-goers and have cordoned off trails. The coyotes are believed to be protecting their den and newborn pups.

But the emergence in recent years of coyotes in the city’s parks, and sometimes in its expensive backyards and picturesque streets, has raised doubts about whether that founding legacy can survive. Will the two animal worlds — the domesticated and the wild — be able to coexist? Might they even, as many in this liberal city hope, ultimately complement each other?

Taking no chances, city officials recently cordoned off trails and barricaded a restroom in an area of Golden Gate Park where reports of coyotes following dog owners and approaching unleashed dogs have been rising. The coyotes are believed to be protecting their den and newborns during the pup-rearing season, which lasts from April through August.

“Coyote alert” signboards and posters, as well as those warning dog owners to keep their pets on leash, have been put up in Golden Gate Park and other pockets where coyotes have been sighted.

Reports of coyotes killing dogs have come in, though none have been substantiated this season.

“Some of it, we don’t know how real it is and how much of it is people raising the hysteria level,” said Rebecca Katz, director of the city’s Animal Care and Control.

The other day, Ms. Katz said, someone called in a coyote attack on a pet pig. “We went out there. There was no pig, no coyote. So yeah.”

The barricades had also upset some people. “So it becomes more and more escalated that way,” she said.

Last week, Animal Care and Control sent out a stern written statement warning that “San Franciscans do not seem to be getting the message about how to coexist peacefully with local wildlife” because many dog owners were ignoring the law and letting their pets run loose. Animal Care posted a video on YouTube of an off-leash Rottweiler, filmed by his owner, harassing two coyotes apparently protecting a den.

Some dog lovers were left unconvinced by the city’s plea for coexistence.

“I’m not fond of wildlife. This is as wild as I want it to get,” said David Powers, who was walking Honda, a mix between a Rottweiler and German shepherd, near the barricaded restroom one recent afternoon. “This is a city. They belong in the country.”

“I’ve never seen any — thank God,” he said, about half an hour before a lone coyote appeared at that spot and lingered more than long enough to satisfy joggers who stopped to take pictures with their iPhones.

In San Francisco, a city of 805,000, there are 108,000 children, according to the 2010 census. And there are 180,000 dogs, and 10 coyotes, according to city estimates. The coyote population has grown nationwide, with an increasing number making forays into suburban and urban areas.

Coyotes arrived relatively late here, with the first sightings in 2004. Around that time, a coyote was videotaped crossing the Golden Gate Bridge into the city at night. Genetic tests later confirmed that the city’s coyotes share ties to those found to the north, on the other side of the bridge.

In 2007, the city had to call federal authorities to shoot two coyotes that had attacked a pair of dogs in Golden Gate Park. Since then, the city has emphasized coexistence.

“Usually, the knee-jerk response is, “Problem: wildlife. Let’s trap and kill,” said Camilla Fox, executive director of Project Coyote, a private organization based in Marin County that has worked with several cities, including San Francisco, to educate people about coyotes. “San Francisco has been very proactive.”

Though some dog owners accepted the coyotes’ presence grudgingly, others embraced it.

In Glen Canyon Park, Matt Orrick said he walked his mutt, Lazlo, at least twice a day and regularly spotted coyotes at dusk. He had never experienced an encounter, though he kept Lazlo off leash.

“They’re doing their own thing,” he said. “It’s pretty cool. This is a big city, and there are wild animals.”

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
NY Times Published: May 11, 2012

PHILADELPHIA — And it shall come to pass that when the 13th baktun comes to an end, so will the world. Everything, even the entombed red-cinnabar-coated kings, shall be destroyed in an apocalypse. So it has been foretold — and so many believe — by the ancient Maya calendar; even Maya deities like the jade-haired maize god and the goggle-eyed storm god must submit. In Arabic numerals the final date would be represented this way: 13.0.0.0.0.

Talk about bad luck. According to the Penn Museum here, which has mounted a major exhibition that manages to be at once tantalizing, illuminating and frustrating, that day is close at hand. Though many experts calculate it to be Dec. 21, 2012, the museum curators believe it is Dec. 23, 2012. And this show, “Maya 2012: Lords of Time,” opens with a teasing potpourri of tabloid headlines, movie disasters and television news reports invoking the imminent catastrophe (though the exhibition is expected to remain open after the world ends, until mid-January 2013).

It’s a setup, of course, because we soon learn that the Maya civilization (which once extended over modern-day southern Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize and El Salvador; built major cities by 500 B.C.; and reached its peak before A.D. 900) had no such idea.

In fact, the Maya Long Count Calendar, the focus of the show’s first part, has no end (and no real beginning). Maya kings erected monuments to themselves using that eternal calendar, combining an immense sense of centrality with an immense sense of immensity.

In the exhibition the apocalyptic premise is so easily overturned that it seems like a straw man, a pretext to draw crowds. The theme is also resurrected at the end: The Maya didn’t believe that the world would end in 2012, we are reminded. And we are asked to vote: “Do you?”

I had other questions. And they had nothing to do with the end of the world but with a civilization that left behind ruins of pyramids, sculptured monuments called stelae and populations scattered over Central America whose languages and cultures can be traced back a millennium to when the Maya reigned supreme.

The overall sensation created here, though, is of mystery. Given the length of time that the Maya thrived — their classic period was A.D. 250 to 900, predating the Aztec and Inca empires — it is astonishing how little is known about them. It is also surprising how much has been pieced together only in the last 50 years, with University of Pennsylvania scholars and the Penn Museum playing central roles, excavating Copán, Honduras (with the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History).

That involvement is the reason that the exhibition is mounted here, though many of its objects are copies, the originals being too heavy or fragile to travel. The show’s main curator, Loa P. Traxler, is co-author, with Robert Sharer, of an essential history, “The Ancient Maya.” One of her co-curators, Kate Quinn, the museum’s director of exhibitions, has introduced clever interactive displays. One touch screen translates familiar dates into the exotic Maya calendar; another lets you explore the extraordinary Copán ruins.

As for artifacts, one jade carving almost tenderly shows the maize god nestled in a seashell, as water and earth join to yield fertile promise. A mysteriously etched pig’s skull from the seventh century shows two lords engaged in an unexplained “calendar ritual.” Most powerful are the hieroglyphic carvings, in which human faces, weapons and ornaments seem manically compressed to fill rectangular molds, saturating available space with bulbous images.

Some of the figures are fearsome. Others seem almost comic: When we see a seventh-century image of the Copán dynasty founder wearing a mask of goggles and a set of fake teeth, we are told that this is meant to invoke Tlaloc, the storm god of central Mexico, but we suspect some whimsy at work. Did the Maya have a sense of humor?

If so, it’s not apparent elsewhere. Stingray spines here, found in fifth-century tombs, were used for bloodletting ceremonies. Blood-colored cinnabar was used to coat the dead and is found throughout the royal tombs. And perhaps because of the hieroglyphs, the sense here is of taut compression and not a little ruthlessness.

One altar (a reproduction) pictures an entire dynasty of kings, created for Copán’s last ruler. A dead jaguar was interred to represent each ruler. The kings used that creature’s fearsome persona as well, perhaps to command the human chattel who created the pyramids that archaeologists have been excavating in the Honduran jungles.

Partly because of the show’s theme, the emphasis here tends to be on Maya culture’s rational aspect. We learn that the Maya are best known for their calendar. But nothing revealed here about it is particularly astounding, and an astronomer interviewed in a video kiosk, Anthony F. Aveni, points out that the Maya did not even have a telescope.

Yet the result is intriguing. The Maya typically used a base of 20 for counting (as we use a base of 10). Their numerals have a systematic simplicity: a vertical bar was a sign for 5 and dots adjacent to it added 1 each — the bar representing, perhaps, a flat outstretched hand, and the dots extended digits for counting. And just as we use days, weeks, months, years, the Maya used cyclical calendar categories (like baktun, kin, winal, tun).

What happens in December is that the 13th baktun in this cycle of history comes to an end, and since a baktun lasts about 144,000 days (just under 400 years), this turn of the odometer is fairly dramatic. That’s about it. The calendar’s importance turns out to be not that it predicts the future, but that, with its patterns and repetitions, it was crucial in deciphering Maya glyphs and their account of the past.

But even the written record has a limit. After the ninth century the historical narrative breaks off. Royal monuments stopped appearing. The population dropped significantly, perhaps as a result of drought, disease or warfare. There was “evidence for the complete breakdown of the political system.” It came to be called the Collapse.

Then, some six centuries later, when the Maya were no longer a force to be reckoned with, they were dealt another blow with the arrival of the Spanish. Smallpox epidemics broke out. Several thousand bark-paper books were burned; only a few survive, some shown here.

Yet once we pass through this historical account, we feel as if we had still been left with too little, when we were promised so much. What were Maya religious beliefs? How did the Maya wield political power? How did they wage war? How did they transmit knowledge? What was the nature of their rituals?

Those questions aren’t really raised, and we are not sure why, except perhaps that some might have unsavory answers. There seems to be a persistent eagerness at the exhibition to spin Maya culture, exaggerating its accomplishments and ignoring shadows.

Maya script, we read, for example, “is now revealed as the world’s most complex writing system.” Really? On what grounds?

And what about human sacrifice? “Though the Maya practiced human sacrifice, there is no evidence of mass killings, as attributed to the Aztecs, or as depicted in the Hollywood movie ‘Apocalypto.’ ” Not terribly illuminating for the only mention of the subject: The Maya practiced human sacrifice, but less often than Mel Gibson thinks. Yet what did human sacrifice entail, and what beliefs were behind it? (We learn elsewhere that it often involved cutting out the victim’s heart.)

And the Maya Collapse, we are informed all too quickly, should not be considered a collapse because Maya descendants still live in the region today. “Like other Native American groups,” we read, “they seek social justice, prosperity and political participation in the modern countries in which they live.”

Perhaps, but like other institutions that show artifacts associated with American Indians, the Penn Museum here invokes platitudes in discussing them, as if repaying some debt, and worrying about portraying a negative image. A large concluding part of the exhibition is devoted to contemporary Maya culture; in interviews Maya recite almost formulaic comments about efforts to reconstitute their lost identity.

The Penn Museum shouldn’t bear the brunt of this criticism; this approach has become the norm. But if the end of days really does turn out to be imminent, shouldn’t we be better prepared to encounter what the ancient Maya deities have in store?

“Maya 2012: Lords of Time” is on view through Jan. 13, 2013, at the Penn Museum, 3260 South Street, Philadelphia; (215) 898-4000, pennmuseum.org.

Through June 2, 2012

Stephen Cohen

Sat, May 12th ~ 2pm
Los Angeles Public Central Library

Stefano Bloch will discuss the birth, life, and slow death of L.A.’s iconic Olympic Festival freeway murals. His talk is based on in-depth ethnographic research conducted on the graffiti community and historical research conducted on L.A.’s Chicano and mainstream muralist traditions. Bloch argues that two decades of bad policy, belligerent graffiti abatement, and combative freeway bombers conspired to turn aesthetically inviting freeway walls into alienating beige eyesores. He will also be showing images from the Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection and sharing excerpts from his personal archive of interviews, images, and reflections that focus on the appearance of L.A.’s public walls.

Sponsored by the Photo Collection and the Art, Music, & Recreation Department, presented by Photo Friends

Parking is available at 524 S. Flower St. Garage (show your LAPL library card at the Central Library’s information desk to receive a validation for reduced rates). Handicap accessibility available.

Los Angeles Public Central Library, Mark Taper Auditorium
630 W Fifth St
Los Angeles, CA, 90071

What is the defining image in the Washington Post’s story on Mitt Romney, as a student at the Cranbrook School, bullying a gay teen-age boy? Maybe it’s Romney, the eighteen-year-old son of a governor, spotting the student, John Lauber, with, as a classmate remembered, “bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye,” and saying, “He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” Or Romney, a few days later, “marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair.” Or the Post’s description of the attack itself:

They came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

It is hard to forget that scene after reading it; how easy could it be after living it? For the five former students who spoke to the Post’s Jason Horowitz —four of them allowed their names to be used—it seems to have been impossible, becoming the sort of indelible, awful wrong that haunts both sides. “It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” Thomas Buford said. “What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.” “It was vicious,” said Philip Maxwell. “He was just easy pickins,” said Matthew Friedemann. He told the Post that he wondered if they’d get in trouble. They didn’t; nor did Romney when another student thought to be gay spoke in class and he called out, “Atta Girl!” Lauber, however, was kicked out of Cranbrook, a private all-boys boarding and day school, when someone saw him smoking a cigarette, alone.

A fourth boy who was there that day, David Seed, still had it on his mind when he stopped for a drink at a bar in O’Hare Airport thirty years later, and “noticed a familiar face”:

“Hey, you’re John Lauber,” Seed recalled saying at the start of a brief conversation. Seed, also among those who witnessed the Romney-led incident, had gone on to a career as a teacher and principal. Now he had something to get off his chest.

“I’m sorry that I didn’t do more to help in the situation,” he said.

Lauber paused, then responded, “It was horrible.” He went on to explain how frightened he was during the incident, and acknowledged to Seed, “It’s something I have thought about a lot since then.”

The one person who says he has not thought about it a lot is Mitt Romney. His campaign told the Post, “The stories of fifty years ago seem exaggerated and off base and Governor Romney has no memory of participating in these incidents.” Thursday morning, as it became clear that this was no kind of answer—that Horowitz and Julie Tate, who contributed to the reporting, had this story down, with witnesses who are members of both political parties and have grown into a range of professions—Romney, on Fox News Radio, offered a blanket apology for anything that might have slipped his mind:

Back in high school, you know, I did some dumb things, and if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously, I apologize for that… You know, I don’t, I don’t remember that particular incident [laughs]… I participated in a lot of high jinks and pranks during high school, and some might have gone too far, and for that I apologize.

Does he count this as a high jink or a prank? It was neither; it is hard to imagine that hurt, rather than being the byproduct, was anything other than the point of the attack on Lauber. In terms of what a gay teen-ager might encounter, and what other boys might go along with at a school like Cranbrook, 1965 was different; but memory and empathy are not qualities that have only been invented since then. As our country has changed, and the other boys became men, they seem to have turned the events of that day over in their minds, not once, but many times, and made something new out of it. That it why it’s all the worse that Romney says he can’t remember—that he walked blithely away from the boy crying on the ground and kept going. Was there nowhere in him for that sight to lodge?

What one does as a teen-ager does not need to mark a person or a politician for life. We can all be stupid. For Senator Rand Paul, it’s Aqua Buddha; for Senator Robert Byrd, it was, more darkly and at a more mature age, his affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan. It took many more years than it should, but Byrd learned how to talk about that in a way that suggested understanding and repentance. Both of those are necessary.

And how far has Romney moved? This story is resonant because one can, all too easily, see Romney walking away even now, or simply failing to connect, to grasp hurt. How he talks about this incident will be impossible to divorce from how he talks about same-sex marriage in the wake of President Obama’s announcement, and about questions of basic dignity for gay and lesbian Americans. But unless he deals with it soundly, it will also be present as people wonder about his compassion for anyone not as well situated and cosseted as he has always been. Who else might he walk away from? Until now, the campaign has talked about his fondness for pranks as a way to humanize him; his wife called him wild and crazy. Is this what they think that means?

Can Romney, in the end, see this story from anyone’s perspective but his own? There were two vantage points on the campus of Cranbrook that day: Romney’s, looking at Lauber; and that of Lauber, who was figuring out who he was, with his newly dyed hair “draped over his eye,” or earlier, at a mirror, wondering how it looked. One hopes he decided it was beautiful, and never changed his mind. Lauber died, of cancer, in 2004, after a life that sounds peripatetic and, in some ways, unsettled. The Post spoke to his surviving sisters: “He kept his hair blond until he died, said his sister Chris. ‘He never stopped bleaching it.’ ”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2012/05/mitt-romney-bully.html#ixzz1uXDRoJ7q

William A. Saturno of Boston University with a portion of the art and writings uncovered in the Maya city known today as Xultún in Guatemala. Photograph by Tyrone Turner/National Geographic

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
NY Times Published: May 10, 2012

Hacking through jungle growth and clearing away rubble, archaeologists made their way to excavate a house buried at the edge of ruins of a large Maya city in the remote Petén lowlands of northeastern Guatemala. It turned out to have been the studio for royal scribes with a taste for art and a devotion to the heavens as the source of calculations for the ancient culture’s elaborate calendars.

Inside, two of the three standing masonry walls were decorated with a faded but still impressive mural, including a painting of a seated king with a scepter and wearing blue feathers. It seemed that, like the Alec Guinness character in the 1958 movie “The Horse’s Mouth,” no Maya artist could abide a wall without a touch of inspired paint. The third wall, on the east side, appeared to have served as the scribes’ blackboard.

On its badly eroded surface, along with black-painted human figures, were scrawled Mayan glyphs and columns of numbers in the form of bars and dots (bars for the number 5 and dots for 1), based on observations of motions of the Sun, the Moon and planets. The glyphs were delicately painted in red or black. From time to time, thin coats of plaster had been applied over texts to provide a clean slate for new calculations. Still other texts were incised into the plaster surface.

The early-ninth-century workshop of scribes and calendar priests was the first important discovery in the ruins of a Maya city known today as Xultún, found a century ago but largely unexplored until the past few years. Archaeologists said the calendar writing on the wall appeared to be already well advanced several centuries earlier than the examples previously known, mainly from the Dresden Codex, a bark-paper book from the period shortly before the Spanish arrived in the early 16th century.

Rest assured, however, that nothing written on those walls foretells the world coming to an end on Dec. 21, 2012, as some have feared through a misinterpretation of the Maya Long Count calendar. That date is simply when one cycle of the Maya calendar ends and a new one begins.

The discovery at Xultún, made by a team led by William A. Saturno of Boston University, was reported in the journal Science, published online on Thursday, and at a teleconference with reporters. The National Geographic Society, which supported the excavations, will describe the research in the June issue of its magazine.

“For the first time,” Dr. Saturno said, “we get a real look at this kind of work space in a Maya city and the scribes’ tight connections to the royal court.”

David Stuart, professor of Mesoamerican art and writing at the University of Texas at Austin, who deciphered the glyphs, said, “This is tremendously exciting,” noting that the columns of numbers interspersed with glyphs inside circles was “the kind of thing that only appears in one place — the Dresden Codex.”

Some of the columns of numbers, for example, are topped by the profile of a lunar deity and represent multiples of 177 or 178, numbers that the archaeologists said were important in ancient Maya astronomy. Eclipse tables in the Dresden Codex are based on sequences of multiples of such numbers. Some texts “defy translation right now,” he said, and some writing is barely legible even with infrared imagery and other enhancements.

Dr. Stuart was an author of the report, along with Dr. Saturno; Anthony F. Aveni, professor of astronomy and anthropology at Colgate University; and Franco Rossi, an archaeologist at Boston University.

One goal of the Maya calendar keepers, the researchers wrote in the journal article, “was to seek harmony between sky events and sacred rituals.” They observed that the calculations appeared to represent various calendrical cycles the Maya were noted for: the 260-day ceremonial calendar, the 365-day solar calendar, the 584-day cycle of Venus and the 780-day cycle of Mars.

They said the sets of the Xultún calculations were “undoubtedly carefully contrived” and “may have been devised to create schemes for synchronizing predictable events connected with the movement of Mars, Venus, the Moon and possibly Mercury.” Why these particular calculations, ranging in duration from 935 to 6,703 years, were used is uncertain, the researchers said.

The principal scribe, who may have been related to the royal family, also left his mark on the north wall, near the presumed king’s picture. Four long numbers there represent dates that stretch over 7,000 years. The scientists said this was the first place that seems to tabulate all these cycles in this way. Another number scratched in the plaster records a date that translates to A.D. 813. This was in the last century of the Classic Period, before the Maya civilization collapsed into Post-Classic decline.

Xultún is a 12-square-mile site where archaeologists estimate that tens of thousands of people once lived. Its first temples and monuments were constructed in the first centuries B.C., only five miles from other Maya ruins at San Bartolo, where in 2001 Dr. Saturno uncovered some of the oldest extant wall paintings at a large ceremonial center. The last known carved monument at Xultún dates to A.D. 890, in the twilight of the Classic Period.

One of Dr. Saturno’s students, Maxwell Chamberlain, came upon the scribes’ buried studio two years ago while following looters’ trenches through the rain forest. The first surprise was that any of the paintings and writings had survived the humidity of the Guatemalan lowlands. The building, part of a larger elite residential complex, was designated No. 54 of 56 structures when mapped by Harvard scientists in the 1970s. Archaeologists suspect that thousands of other houses remain uncounted.

Although there may be reasons to worry about the future, the researchers emphasized that nothing in Maya beliefs or calendars warranted hoisting “The End Is Nigh” placards. A change in the Long Count cycle, said Dr. Aveni, an astroarchaeologist, is like the odometer of a car rolling over from 120,000 to 130,000. “The car gets a step closer to the junkyard as the numbers turn over,” he said. “The Maya just start over.”

It is done.

On Wednesday, a president of the United States of America, Barack Obama, officially embraced same-sex marriage.

He told ABC News:

At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.

It is important to pause here for a moment to appreciate the historical weight of this moment before recounting the president’s past “evolving” on the subject or delving into tomorrow’s strategizing about its political implications.

No one should underestimate the power of this message coming from the president.

Obama explained his decision in a religious framework and revealed that the first lady was involved in this decision:

This is something that, you know, we’ve talked about over the years and she, you know, she feels the same way, she feels the same way that I do. And that is that, in the end the values that I care most deeply about and she cares most deeply about is how we treat other people and, you know, I, you know, we are both practicing Christians and obviously this position may be considered to put us at odds with the views of others but, you know, when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated. And I think that’s what we try to impart to our kids and that’s what motivates me as president, and I figure the most consistent I can be in being true to those precepts, the better I’ll be as a dad and a husband and, hopefully, the better I’ll be as president.

Amen.

Today, we are an inch taller as a nation. Today, we are a mile closer to the ideals described in the Declaration of Independence. Today, we have been transported light-years beyond where many ever thought we would be.

History will remember this president in this moment. He stood up for personal liberty and publicly affirmed what should have needed no affirmation: that in a just society the rights of some must be the rights of all, that we do not condemn those who love differently, that we are all made greater when we are all treated equally.

Joe Solmonese, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, issued a statement today that read in part:

Today, President Obama made history by boldly stating that gay and lesbian Americans should be fully and equally part of the fabric of American society and that our families deserve nothing less than the equal respect and recognition that comes through marriage. His presidency has shown that our nation can move beyond its shameful history of discrimination and injustice.

Some have argued that the president should have delayed any movement on this issue until after the election, so as to not provide Republicans with a wedge issue.

I strongly disagree with this position.

There is no wrong time to do the right thing. But the calculation of delay can erode the virtue of acting on what your conscience is telling you. The courage required in the present is greater than the comforts afforded by the future.

Not everyone will be happy. Important positions are not always popular. But they are necessary. Leaders with vision understand this.

As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable.” In fact,

Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.

Risking the objection of some supporters is part of the sacrifice. But King also said that “a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.”

I don’t know about you, but I prefer leadership from leaders.

It is a natural impulse of all people to live freely in their own truth. President Obama yesterday lent his voice to affirming the basic humanity of gay and lesbian communities.

Standing up for what one truly believes is one of the greatest things a person can do. And, in the end, I believe that most Americans respect the courage of conviction and the pursuit of fairness, even if they have not come to accept same-sex marriage or even homosexuality.

Courage in politics isn’t always plentiful, and justice in the world isn’t always swift. Could Obama have moved more quickly? Maybe. But the important thing to remember is that he did move.

By HILARY GREENBAUM and DANA RUBINSTEIN
NY Times Published: April 27, 2012

Before a New Jersey-born son of a Scottish farmer named John Landis Mason patented his jar in 1858, home-food preservation was a tricky affair. Modern heat-based canning, pioneered by a Frenchman in 1806, was too cumbersome for most home cooks, many of whom relied on cork-and-wax contraptions to seal food, often imperfectly, into vessels whose opaque walls rendered the contents invisible.

The Mason jar was different. With its threaded neck and screw-on lid, “the canner could form a seal as hot liquids cooled,” writes Mary Ellen Snodgrass in The Encyclopedia of Kitchen History. Mason jars, made of a manganese-bleached glass, were also transparent. “Being able to see what you have on hand and what’s going on inside the bottle, that’s what’s really important,” says Megan Elias, the author of “Stir It Up: Home Economics in American Culture.”

Mason never capitalized on his success. He assigned his patent rights to another company and died a charity case — the invention that bore his name helped spark a home-canning revolution that lasted until the 1950s.

By the early 20th century, industrial advances made jar manufacturing faster and more economical. Competitors like the Ball brothers were, according to Quentin Skrabec’s biography of H. J. Heinz, making mass-produced Mason jars widely available. Mason jars made it possible to preserve green beans and apples and peaches that could be eaten in January. Settlers in the Pacific Northwest filled the jars with wild huckleberries. “By autumn, every housewife had hundreds of quart and half-gallon jars stored in the basement or root cellar,” writes Paul Conkin in “A Revolution Down on the Farm.”

World War II caused another spike in Mason-jar production. The government, which had rationed foodstuffs and the tins used to hold them, encouraged Americans to cultivate victory gardenso and preserve what they grew at home. Between 1939 and 1949, Americans bought more than three million canning jars. But the Mason-jar heyday did not last. In the postwar years, Americans left farms for the suburbs and houses with refrigerators. Farmers learned how to freeze their bounty, and even in those days, Elias says, many didn’t live far from a supermarket.

Today original Mason jars are prized collectibles. There are lots of them, which, the historian Andrew F. Smith points out, “is a testament to the number of Mason jars that were in fact used.” In contemporary America, Mason jars are as likely to hold pencils as apricot jam. But home canning has gained traction among a certain class of urban locavores. “It’s kind of for the foodies,” Smith says.

“Do I think it’s a mass movement?” he adds. “No.”

GLASS MENAGERIE

Bill Lindsey started collecting glass bottles in high school. He now owns well over a thousand, and he writes about them for the Society for Historical Archaeology. Here he discusses the value and legacy of the Mason jar.

What effect did the Mason jar have on the glass-jar industry? Mason jars are the glass-jar industry. The first machine that was successful for making glass containers was making Mason jars.

Are they considered collectible? It’s probably the most common jar, but there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of variations. What really matters most for collectibility is color. Cobalt blue is probably the supreme one; there’s only a few of those around, and they would sell for $10,000 or $15,000 for a jar.

Has it changed much since the original design? There have been a few iterations, but it’s really kind of phenomenal that the same basic design is still in use today. There have been a lot of different patents through the years, but in the end what won was the screw-top Mason jar.

WASHINGTON — Continuing its crackdown on Internet privacy violations, the Federal Trade Commission charged Myspace on Tuesday with violating federal law by breaching its promise not to share users’ personal information, including their Web browsing habits, with advertising companies.

The advertisers that tracked the online browsing habits of Myspace users were not charged, reflecting a general lack of laws governing online privacy. On Wednesday, the Senate Commerce committee will question officials from the F.T.C. and the Obama administration about their recent proposals to require companies to obtain consumers’ permission to be tracked online.

The F.T.C. asserted that from January 2009 through June 2010, and again from October 2010 through October 2011, Myspace, a social media Web site, transmitted information, including internal identification numbers of users, and their ages and genders, to outside ad networks that served ads to Myspace.

Using that information, the F.T.C. said, third parties could obtain the user’s name and other personal information and use a file placed on the user’s computer to view a history of Web sites the user had visited.

That violated the privacy policy that Myspace disseminated beginning in 2008, which said that the company “will not share your personally identifiable information with third parties unless you have given Myspace permission to do so.”

Without admitting or denying the F.T.C.’s charge, Myspace agreed to a tentative consent order announced Tuesday that requires it to obey its stated privacy policies, to establish comprehensive privacy controls and procedures and to submit to audits of its actions every other year for 20 years.

News Corporation sold Myspace in June to Specific Media, an advertising group based in Irvine, Calif., and Justin Timberlake, the musician. In a statement, Specific Media said it had settled the case “to put any questions regarding Myspace’s preacquisition practices behind us.” Some of the period covered by the accusations came after Specific Media bought Myspace.

Myspace has about 25 million users in the United States, according to comScore; Facebook has about 159 million users.

The F.T.C. does not have the legal authority to assess penalties for violations of the Federal Trade Commission Act, like those reported against Myspace. If the commission accepts the consent order after a 30-day public comment period, later violations of the agreement could be punished with a civil penalty of up to $16,000 for each transgression.

“One of our first actions after acquiring Myspace was to thoroughly examine the company’s business practices and, where applicable, make improvements,” Specific Media said. “A major focus of this review was to ensure that Myspace delivered advertisements to consumers in a manner that safeguarded their privacy.”

The agreement with Myspace is similar to one the F.T.C. made in November with Facebook over its sharing of users’ information with advertisers and making public information that it had said would be kept private.

The F.T.C. settled a similar privacy case with Google over the start-up of its Google Buzz network last year. The commission is now investigating whether Google violated that agreement when it reportedly circumvented privacy controls on Apple’s Safari browser on computers and mobile devices, according to people close to the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to prejudice the inquiry.

Aspects of those settlements and the F.T.C.’s other Internet privacy actions are likely to come up at a Senate Commerce committee hearing on Wednesday. The F.T.C. chairman, Jon Leibowitz, and Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen will testify about aspects of an F.T.C. report issued in March. It recommended privacy legislation and urged Internet companies to build Do Not Track safeguards into their products. Cameron F. Kerry, general counsel for the Commerce Department, will also testify about the Obama administration’s privacy framework, released in February, which included a privacy “bill of rights.”

The F.T.C. on Tuesday also filed charges in Federal District Court in San Antonio seeking a civil contempt ruling against the Billing Services Group, a San Antonio company that provides services to telephone companies. The commission said that from 2006 to 2010, Billing Services violated a court order against placing false charges on consumers’ phone bills.

The charges were typically for so-called enhanced services, like voice mail, streaming video and identity theft protection, that consumers had not authorized, the F.T.C. said. According to the F.T.C.’s complaint, Billing Services placed more than $70 million in fake charges on phone bills; it refunded some of the charges, but the F.T.C. is seeking $52.6 million in additional refunds.

In 1999, the company signed an agreement with the F.T.C. promising to refrain from unauthorized billing, misrepresenting services and charges to consumers and providing billing services to vendors who failed to clearly disclose the terms of their services.

The Billing Services Group strongly disputed the F.T.C.’s assertions. It said it had cooperated fully with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in its investigation of the company that it said was at fault, a company it described as a former client but that was not a part of the company.

“Throughout the investigation, the company was repeatedly informed that B.S.G. was not suspected of any wrongdoing,” the Billing Services Group said in a news release. “The F.T.C. plainly misunderstands B.S.G.’s business, and declined our invitation to meet with them about our due diligence processes before filing its motion.”

Through June 10, 2012

James Fuentes

Thanks to RS

Garden Design Magazine
June 2012

By JOHN SCHWARTZ
NY Times Published: May 7, 2012

CHICAGO — When it comes to rail traffic, Chicago is America’s speed bump.

Shippers complain that a load of freight can make its way from Los Angeles to Chicago in 48 hours, then take 30 hours to travel across the city. A recent trainload of sulfur took some 27 hours to pass through Chicago — an average speed of 1.13 miles per hour, or about a quarter the pace of many electric wheelchairs.

With freight volume in the United States expected to grow by more than 80 percent in the next 20 years, delays are projected to only get worse.

The underlying reasons for this sprawling traffic jam are complex, involving history, economics and a nation’s disinclination to improve its roads, bridges, and rails.

Six of the nation’s seven biggest railroads pass through the city, a testament to Chicago’s economic might when the rail lines were laid from the 1800s on. Today, a quarter of all rail traffic in the nation touches Chicago. Nearly half of what is known as intermodal rail traffic, the big steel boxes that can be carried aboard ships, trains or trucks, roll by, or through, this city.

The slowdown involves more than freight. The other day, William C. Thompson, a project manager for the Association of American Railroads, stood next to a crossroads of steel in the Englewood neighborhood pointing to a web of tracks used by freight trains and Amtrak passenger trains that intersected tracks for Metra, Chicago’s commuter rail. The commuter trains get to go first, he said, and so, “Amtrak tells me they have more delays here than anywhere else in the system.”

More delays than anywhere else in the Chicago area? No, he explained. “In the entire United States.”

Now, federal, state, local and industry officials are completing the early stages of a $3.2 billion project to untangle Chicago’s rail system — not just for its residents, who suffer commuter train delays and long waits in their cars at grade crossings, but for the rest of the nation as well.

The program, called Create (an acronym for Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency Program), is intended to replace 25 rail intersections with overpasses and underpasses that will smooth the flow of traffic for the 1,300 freight and passenger trains that muscle through the city each day, and to separate tracks now shared by freight and passenger trains at critical spots. Fifty miles of new track will link yards and create a second east-west route across the city, building redundancy into the overburdened system.

Fourteen of the 70 projects have been completed so far, and 12 more are under way, including the $140 million “Englewood flyover,” or overpass.

While much of the country’s attention in transportation issues is focused on high-speed rail projects trumpeted by the Obama administration, Create is largely about bringing old-fashioned low-speed rail up to modern standards. Innovative financing combines federal, state and private funds from various programs, including the federal stimulus packages. Create even uses some funds tied to high-speed rail, since many of the projects are being designed to accommodate those lines in the future.

One of the biggest holdups for freight traffic is that Chicago’s crowded rails must also get hundreds of thousands of commuters to work and home mornings and evenings, and so by an agreement known as the Chicago Protocol, the shared tracks and intersections belong to passenger rail during rush hours.

The progress of a few recent trains as measured by the railroads shows how the delays occur. Among them was a coal train traveling 1,100 miles east from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming.

The train reached Chicago in 60 hours; its average speed, with delays for traffic control and a delivery schedule on the first leg, was 18 miles per hour. Within the “corral” of the greater Chicago area, the average speed dropped to 3.9 miles per hour, the pace of a rapid walk. It took more than 10 hours to move the 40 miles across the city. It had to stop completely on the outskirts of town during commuter rush hours and wait its turn at “interlockings” — go-slow rail intersections like the one at Englewood. Once outside Chicago, the train’s average leapt to 36 miles per hour.

Some of the causes of delay might have seemed outdated in the 20th century, much less the 21st, like manual switches that engineers have to throw after their trains have passed. Create is replacing them with electronic switches and online traffic control networks, but until then engineers at some points have to get out of their cabins, walk the length of the train back to the switch — a mile or more — operate the switch, and then trudge back to their place at the head of the train before setting out again.

Chicago had lived with its rail anachronisms and idiosyncrasies for decades, but everything fell apart in a 1999 blizzard that paralyzed the city’s rails and backed up train traffic across the United States for months.

“The traffic just kept coming and coming and coming,” said David Grewe, a supervisor for Union Pacific Railroad. “We basically waited for the spring thaw.”

The resulting plan to fix its rail problems started with efforts to reduce delays by improving coordination among the six freight rail companies, an effort that includes Mr. Grewe, as well as Metra and Amtrak. “You would have thought that coordination would have taken place in the past,” Mr. Grewe said. “Unfortunately, it didn’t.”

Mr. Thompson, the rail association’s program manager for Create, said that building during a recession had produced a bonus, as construction companies eager to get the work have come in under budget on every project. “It’s a very good time to be building infrastructure,” he said.

With more than a dozen of the smaller projects in place, rail officials say they have already seen some reduction in delays, said Joe Shachter, director of public and intermodal transportation for the Illinois Department of Transportation, with bigger improvements to come. “The next two or three years in particular we think are going to show great advances,” he said.

But the full benefits will be felt only if all of the projects can be completed, Mr. Thompson said: a knot of interrelated problems requires a network of solutions.

And there lies a potentially larger problem than anything in the steel rails that snake across the city. While some of the financing for Create has come from private industry and state bonds, further progress depends almost entirely on the ability of Congress to pass transportation legislation. That legislation has historically been passed in a bipartisan manner. But Congress, eager to squeeze the budget and in continual disagreement about the nation’s priorities, has found itself repeatedly at impasse over the current transportation bill.

To Brian Imus, staff director of Illinois PIRG, a consumer group, “it seems like as much gridlock as we’ve got with our trains, it’s even worse in Washington, D.C.”

By ROBERTA SMITH
NY Times Published: May 3, 2012

Photographs of the peripatetic Italian Modernist Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) often show a neat, slightly imperious man who resembles a successful banker relaxing after work in his starched white shirt, black vest and dark tie. He is outfitted thus in a series of images taken by the Italian photographer Ugo Mulas in 1964. Showing the artist in his studio calmly cutting one of his long signature slashes in a pristine canvas, they give a restrained, dignified start to the extraordinary exhibition of Fontana’s work at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. But look out.

The show immerses the visitor in a kind of delirium of agitated, decidedly unbanker-ish artistic thought, providing a freewheeling, profoundly experiential account of the most radical phase of Fontana’s innovative, slightly daft efforts. Motivated by his desire to get beyond mere art objects to what he called “spatialist art,” Fontana began in the late 1940s to gouge small holes and cut slashes in stretched canvases, making works that he uniformly titled “Concetto Spaziale,” or “Spatial Concept.”

Then he began experimenting with “Ambienti Spaziali,” or “Spatial Environments,” that merged architecture, painting and sculpture, and used new materials. “There cannot be an evolution in art with stone and paint,” he wrote.

Gagosian’s “Lucio Fontana: Ambienti Spaziali” is the most comprehensive survey of Fontana’s work to be staged in the United States. Inspiring if also flawed, it is just the kind of show that the product-driven art world needs. It covers the final two decades of the artist’s career, wending through some dozen rooms with nearly 70 “Spatial Concept” paintings — wonderful gouged works and a few too many of his relatively slick slashed ones — and a handful of bronze orb-shaped sculptures.

But the primary revelations here are six walk-in environments and an immense scribble of neon suspended from the ceiling. Works of this kind have never been exhibited in this country; they are accompanied here by lively, rarely seen drawings and studies.

The exhibition has been organized by the Italian art critic and curator Germano Celant and Valentina Castellani, a director at Gagosian, in collaboration with the Fondazione Lucio Fontana in Milan, where the artist spent most of his career. It presents Fontana as a visionary and risk taker, who, like many of his ilk, was slightly ahead of his time (and, often, his materials) and did not always achieve his goals.

But it is part of this show’s wisdom and relevance to remind us that art-making is a process of research and striving, not only polished fait accompli. The earliest environment is a mildly funky grottolike black-light affair that Fontana exhibited in Milan in 1949. It consists of a flotilla of distended, amoeboid papier-mâché forms and accompanying curlicues hanging from the ceiling and highlighted by fluorescent paints so new that Fontana had to import them from Britain. In a kind of past-future time warp that is often characteristic of Fontana, it suggests both docking spaceships and levitating fossils, as well as, oddly enough, one of Frank Stella’s mid-1970s Exotic Bird reliefs, disassembled.

Born in Argentina in 1899 to Italian parents, Fontana was raised in Italy and fought in its army in World War I. Returning to Argentina in 1922, he trained with his father, a sculptor, in stone, ceramics and metal before going back to Milan six years later. He had his first gallery exhibition there in 1930 and progressed ecumenically through the decade, working in a range of styles and mediums, in both fine and applied art. On the one hand, he made geometric paintings and planar sculptures that earned him membership in the Abstraction-Creation group in Paris, where he spent time. On the other, in Italy he executed public commissions for the Fascist government, reiterating Classically inspired figures, horses and chariots in flamboyantly modeled forms worked up from his clay maquettes.

In yet another vein, around 1940 he also made streamlined female portrait busts, tiled in polychrome glass, that point deliciously toward Pop by way of Byzantine mosaics and Art Deco. Then, while Fontana was sitting out World War II in Argentina, where he started an art school, his environmental-art ideas began to percolate. By 1947 he was back in Milan. Allied bombs had destroyed his studio, giving him, in a sense, a clean start.

The works at Gagosian concentrate on the relatively pure, abstract side of Fontana’s final phase, which is not exactly the whole story; his ecumenical approach continued. The exhibition’s lavish catalog not only reproduces other environments, but it also contains images of suave ceiling decorations and vaguely figurative ceramic pieces. Yet this show posits his environmental art as his ticket to history.

It begins by showing him pushing literally through his canvas and burlap surfaces. The early gouged paintings compete with Pollock in their physical forthrightness. Some feature woozy stained forms; most are embellished with chunks of colored Murano glass. Their swirling compositions are at once earthy and cosmic, garishly decorative and atmospheric.

Since the show’s curators persuaded many lenders to allow their loans to be exhibited without their usual glass-fronted frames, the early paintings’ colors sing and their eccentric assortments of lumps and holes can be closely scrutinized. (Note for example the different “marks” achieved by using square or round punches, or gouging from the back of the canvas instead of the front.)

As befits someone trained as a sculptor, Fontana approached painting with inspired, literal-minded impatience, as a door to another realm. Soon he was through it and moving fast.

In 1951, two years after his first papier-mâché environment, he made one of modern art’s first neon sculptures, creating an immense looping spiral that caroms and curves across the ceiling of the show’s largest gallery with the vivacity of an intimate doodle. Similarly advanced is an environment from 1959-60 that consists of a big hanging cube defined by parallel strips of white and blue neon, as if made from “Spatial Concept” slices liberated from canvas.

But even as his environments pointed beyond painting, Fontana never gave it up. He rejiggered and reconstituted its components in space and on the wall for the rest of his life.

Two black-light environments from the mid-’60s spread painting thin with wraparound constellations of glowing dots reminiscent of Miró. Back on canvas, he experimented with motifs, stretcher shape and paint densities and, always, various forms of penetration. Three paintings inspired by Venice are implacably muscular, including “Spatial Concept: Venetian Lagoon,” which evokes moonlit waves with an almost ham-handed combination of thick silver paint, horizontal slices and scratches, and a big black circular outline.

And then there’s “Spatial Concept (Trinity),” from 1966, executed here for the first time from plans recently discovered among Fontana’s drawings. Splitting the difference between painting and environment, it features three large canvases lathered with white paint: two gouged with parallel lines flanking one punctured with a big spiral. They are loosely framed by three large curved elements made of plywood wrapped in blue cloth and attached directly to the wall. A long one, placed along the bottom of the wall, swells gently upward, suggesting the earth’s ocean-covered curve; two shorter ones, dipping down from the wall’s upper corners, might be clouds, but also hint at a proscenium arch and curtains. The work is a joyous, slightly comedic Ascension: painting, pure and white, in something like its own puppet show, rising to heaven.

Fontana was great, but he was also all over the place — a theorist, an artist and a hands-on artisan making it up as he went along. This magnanimous exhibition presents him more fully to an American audience than anything before, and it is varied enough to thwart a simple reading of him as a purist whose efforts pointed in only one direction, toward the heady ether of dematerialized art. A more complete account of his career in all its sprawling, contradictory, polymorphousness would present an immense curatorial challenge, but would be an even greater gift.

“Lucio Fontana: Ambienti Spaziali” runs through June 30 at the
Gagosian Gallery

Before the Great Recession, I would sometimes give public lectures in which I would talk about rising inequality, making the point that the concentration of income at the top had reached levels not seen since 1929. Often, someone in the audience would ask whether this meant that another depression was imminent.

Well, whaddya know?

Did the rise of the 1 percent (or, better yet, the 0.01 percent) cause the Lesser Depression we’re now living through? It probably contributed. But the more important point is that inequality is a major reason the economy is still so depressed and unemployment so high. For we have responded to crisis with a mix of paralysis and confusion — both of which have a lot to do with the distorting effects of great wealth on our society.

Put it this way: If something like the financial crisis of 2008 had occurred in, say, 1971 — the year Richard Nixon declared that “I am now a Keynesian in economic policy” — Washington would probably have responded fairly effectively. There would have been a broad bipartisan consensus in favor of strong action, and there would also have been wide agreement about what kind of action was needed.

But that was then. Today, Washington is marked by a combination of bitter partisanship and intellectual confusion — and both are, I would argue, largely the result of extreme income inequality.

On partisanship: The Congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have been making waves with a new book acknowledging a truth that, until now, was unmentionable in polite circles. They say our political dysfunction is largely because of the transformation of the Republican Party into an extremist force that is “dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” You can’t get cooperation to serve the national interest when one side of the divide sees no distinction between the national interest and its own partisan triumph.

So how did that happen? For the past century, political polarization has closely tracked income inequality, and there’s every reason to believe that the relationship is causal. Specifically, money buys power, and the increasing wealth of a tiny minority has effectively bought the allegiance of one of our two major political parties, in the process destroying any prospect for cooperation.

And the takeover of half our political spectrum by the 0.01 percent is, I’d argue, also responsible for the degradation of our economic discourse, which has made any sensible discussion of what we should be doing impossible.

Disputes in economics used to be bounded by a shared understanding of the evidence, creating a broad range of agreement about economic policy. To take the most prominent example, Milton Friedman may have opposed fiscal activism, but he very much supported monetary activism to fight deep economic slumps, to an extent that would have put him well to the left of center in many current debates.

Now, however, the Republican Party is dominated by doctrines formerly on the political fringe. Friedman called for monetary flexibility; today, much of the G.O.P. is fanatically devoted to the gold standard. N. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard University, a Romney economic adviser, once dismissed those claiming that tax cuts pay for themselves as “charlatans and cranks”; today, that notion is very close to being official Republican doctrine.

As it happens, these doctrines have overwhelmingly failed in practice. For example, conservative goldbugs have been predicting vast inflation and soaring interest rates for three years, and have been wrong every step of the way. But this failure has done nothing to dent their influence on a party that, as Mr. Mann and Mr. Ornstein note, is “unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science.”

And why is the G.O.P. so devoted to these doctrines regardless of facts and evidence? It surely has a lot to do with the fact that billionaires have always loved the doctrines in question, which offer a rationale for policies that serve their interests. Indeed, support from billionaires has always been the main thing keeping those charlatans and cranks in business. And now the same people effectively own a whole political party.

Which brings us to the question of what it will take to end this depression we’re in.

Many pundits assert that the U.S. economy has big structural problems that will prevent any quick recovery. All the evidence, however, points to a simple lack of demand, which could and should be cured very quickly through a combination of fiscal and monetary stimulus.

No, the real structural problem is in our political system, which has been warped and paralyzed by the power of a small, wealthy minority. And the key to economic recovery lies in finding a way to get past that minority’s malign influence.

Scientists are observing with increasing alarm that some very common hormone-mimicking chemicals can have grotesque effects.

A widely used herbicide acts as a female hormone and feminizes male animals in the wild. Thus male frogs can have female organs, and some male fish actually produce eggs. In a Florida lake contaminated by these chemicals, male alligators have tiny penises.

These days there is also growing evidence linking this class of chemicals to problems in humans. These include breast cancer, infertility, low sperm counts, genital deformities, early menstruation and even diabetes and obesity.

Philip Landrigan, a professor of pediatrics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, says that a congenital defect called hypospadias — a misplacement of the urethra — is now twice as common among newborn boys as it used to be. He suspects endocrine disruptors, so called because they can wreak havoc with the endocrine system that governs hormones.

Endocrine disruptors are everywhere. They’re in thermal receipts that come out of gas pumps and A.T.M.’s. They’re in canned foods, cosmetics, plastics and food packaging. Test your blood or urine, and you’ll surely find them there, as well as in human breast milk and in cord blood of newborn babies.

In this campaign year, we are bound to hear endless complaints about excessive government regulation. But here’s an area where scientists are increasingly critical of our government for its failure to tackle Big Chem and regulate endocrine disruptors adequately.

Last month, the Endocrine Society, the leading association of hormone experts, scolded the Food and Drug Administration for its failure to ban bisphenol-A, a common endocrine disruptor known as BPA, from food packaging. Last year, eight medical organizations representing genetics, gynecology, urology and other fields made a joint call in Science magazine for tighter regulation of endocrine disruptors.

Shouldn’t our government be as vigilant about threats in our grocery stores as in the mountains of Afghanistan?

Researchers warn that endocrine disruptors can trigger hormonal changes in the body that may not show up for decades. One called DES, a synthetic form of estrogen, was once routinely given to pregnant women to prevent miscarriage or morning sickness, and it did little harm to the women themselves. But it turned out to cause vaginal cancer and breast cancer decades later in their daughters, so it is now banned.

Scientists have long known the tiniest variations in hormone levels influence fetal development. For example, a female twin is very slightly masculinized if the other twin is a male, because she is exposed to some of his hormones. Studies have found that these female twins, on average, end up slightly more aggressive and sensation-seeking as adults but have lower rates of eating disorders.

Now experts worry that endocrine disruptors have similar effects, acting as hormones and swamping the delicate balance for fetuses in particular. The latest initiative by scholars is a landmark 78-page analysis to be published next month in Endocrine Reviews, the leading publication in the field.

“Fundamental changes in chemical testing and safety determination are needed to protect human health,” the analysis declares. Linda S. Birnbaum, the nation’s chief environmental scientist and toxicologist, endorsed the findings.

The article was written by a 12-member panel that spent three years reviewing the evidence. It concluded that the nation’s safety system for endocrine disruptors is broken.

“For several well-studied endocrine disruptors, I think it is fair to say that we have enough data to conclude that these chemicals are not safe for human populations,” said Laura Vandenberg, a Tufts University developmental biologist who was the lead writer for the panel.

Worrying new research on the long-term effects of these chemicals is constantly being published. One study found that pregnant women who have higher levels of a common endocrine disruptor, PFOA, are three times as likely to have daughters who grow up to be overweight. Yet PFOA is unavoidable. It is in everything from microwave popcorn bags to carpet-cleaning solutions.

Big Chem says all this is sensationalist science. So far, it has blocked strict regulation in the United States, even as Europe and Canada have adopted tighter controls on endocrine disruptors.

Yes, there are uncertainties. But the scientists who know endocrine disruptors best overwhelmingly are already taking steps to protect their families. John Peterson Myers, chief scientist at Environmental Health Sciences and a co-author of the new analysis, said that his family had stopped buying canned food.

“We don’t microwave in plastic,” he added. “We don’t use pesticides in our house. I refuse receipts whenever I can. My default request at the A.T.M., known to my bank, is ‘no receipt.’ I never ask for a receipt from a gas station.”

I’m taking my cue from the experts, and I wish the Obama administration would as well.

The Engraved Plane

May 2 to June 10, 2012
Opening May 2nd (from 6-8pm)

Simone Subal

Michael and Magdalena Suarez Frimkess Studio Visit

via

Chen Guangcheng, a Chinese activist who escaped and sought refuge with the Americans, is a man of extraordinary courage. A self-taught lawyer who is blind, he has campaigned tirelessly against the forced abortions and sterilizations that are central to China’s one-child policy.

The case is creating sharp new tensions in American relations with China just as the two countries are scheduled to hold their annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue. Scores of senior officials are scheduled to meet in Beijing this week to discuss an important agenda, including China’s artificially undervalued currency, disputes over intellectual property and how much Beijing will do to help rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions and halt North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

The United States needs to work with Beijing. But Mr. Chen’s safety and that of his family is not negotiable. There would be no crisis if China’s autocrats didn’t deny their people the most basic rights. China, eager for international respect, will further damage its reputation if it continues to abuse its own citizens.

In 2006, Mr. Chen was sentenced to 51 months in prison on bogus charges of destroying property and assembling a crowd to disrupt traffic. His release in 2010 did not mean freedom. Local authorities put him under an extralegal form of house arrest with police surrounding his family farmhouse in Shandong Province. In a video posted on the Internet on Friday, Mr. Chen talks of being subjected to “brutal” treatment, including an incident when “more than a dozen men assaulted my wife” and also “violently assaulted me.”

It is no wonder that he took desperate measures. According to The Times, he scaled the wall around his house, gave his guards the slip and made a 300-plus-mile journey to Beijing where American diplomats are believed to be sheltering him. But there are serious concerns about what has since happened to his wife, daughter and others who aided his escape.

The Obama administration has frequently spoken out on Mr. Chen’s behalf, including a speech last November in which Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed alarm about his continued house arrest. On Sunday, after Mr. Chen sought American protection, Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell was quietly dispatched to Beijing.

At a news conference on Monday, President Obama prodded China to improve its human rights record, saying the country “will be stronger as it opens up and liberalizes its own system,” but he refused to comment on Mr. Chen’s case. Chinese officials aren’t speaking publicly about the case; we hope that means they are looking for a way out. And, for now, quiet diplomacy may hold the best chance for a solution.

We don’t know for sure what Mr. Chen wants — asylum in the United States or, as activists have said, assurances that would permit him to remain in China. In last week’s video, he offered a possible face-saving path: He appealed to Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to “personally intervene” by investigating the case and punishing “those who ordered county-level police and officials to break into my house, beat and hurt me, refused me medical attention — without any legal foundation or officers wearing uniforms.” That could allow Beijing to blame local authorities for the mistreatment, even though the culture of abuse and trampled rights starts at the top.

Corrupt officials and disregard for the rule of law are the true threat to China, not Mr. Chen and others who courageously defend human rights. Mr. Wen says he wants political reforms. This is his moment to show that China is ready to embark on a more honorable and sustainable path.

In Spain, the unemployment rate among workers under 25 is more than 50 percent. In Ireland almost a third of the young are unemployed. Here in America, youth unemployment is “only” 16.5 percent, which is still terrible — but things could be worse.

And sure enough, many politicians are doing all they can to guarantee that things will, in fact, get worse. We’ve been hearing a lot about the war on women, which is real enough. But there’s also a war on the young, which is just as real even if it’s better disguised. And it’s doing immense harm, not just to the young, but to the nation’s future.

Let’s start with some advice Mitt Romney gave to college students during an appearance last week. After denouncing President Obama’s “divisiveness,” the candidate told his audience, “Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.”

The first thing you notice here is, of course, the Romney touch — the distinctive lack of empathy for those who weren’t born into affluent families, who can’t rely on the Bank of Mom and Dad to finance their ambitions. But the rest of the remark is just as bad in its own way.

I mean, “get the education”? And pay for it how? Tuition at public colleges and universities has soared, in part thanks to sharp reductions in state aid. Mr. Romney isn’t proposing anything that would fix that; he is, however, a strong supporter of the Ryan budget plan, which would drastically cut federal student aid, causing roughly a million students to lose their Pell grants.

So how, exactly, are young people from cash-strapped families supposed to “get the education”? Back in March Mr. Romney had the answer: Find the college “that has a little lower price where you can get a good education.” Good luck with that. But I guess it’s divisive to point out that Mr. Romney’s prescriptions are useless for Americans who weren’t born with his advantages.

There is, however, a larger issue: even if students do manage, somehow, to “get the education,” which they do all too often by incurring a lot of debt, they’ll be graduating into an economy that doesn’t seem to want them.

You’ve probably heard lots about how workers with college degrees are faring better in this slump than those with only a high school education, which is true. But the story is far less encouraging if you focus not on middle-aged Americans with degrees but on recent graduates. Unemployment among recent graduates has soared; so has part-time work, presumably reflecting the inability of graduates to find full-time jobs. Perhaps most telling, earnings have plunged even among those graduates working full time — a sign that many have been forced to take jobs that make no use of their education.

College graduates, then, are taking it on the chin thanks to the weak economy. And research tells us that the price isn’t temporary: students who graduate into a bad economy never recover the lost ground. Instead, their earnings are depressed for life.

What the young need most of all, then, is a better job market. People like Mr. Romney claim that they have the recipe for job creation: slash taxes on corporations and the rich, slash spending on public services and the poor. But we now have plenty of evidence on how these policies actually work in a depressed economy — and they clearly destroy jobs rather than create them.

For as you look at the economic devastation in Europe, you should bear in mind that some of the countries experiencing the worst devastation have been doing everything American conservatives say we should do here. Not long ago, conservatives gushed over Ireland’s economic policies, especially its low corporate tax rate; the Heritage Foundation used to give it higher marks for “economic freedom” than any other Western nation. When things went bad, Ireland once again received lavish praise, this time for its harsh spending cuts, which were supposed to inspire confidence and lead to quick recovery.

And now, as I said, almost a third of Ireland’s young can’t find jobs.

What should we do to help America’s young? Basically, the opposite of what Mr. Romney and his friends want. We should be expanding student aid, not slashing it. And we should reverse the de facto austerity policies that are holding back the U.S. economy — the unprecedented cutbacks at the state and local level, which have been hitting education especially hard.

Yes, such a policy reversal would cost money. But refusing to spend that money is foolish and shortsighted even in purely fiscal terms. Remember, the young aren’t just America’s future; they’re the future of the tax base, too.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste; wasting the minds of a whole generation is even more terrible. Let’s stop doing it.

By CHARLES DUHIGG and DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
NY Times Published: April 28, 2012

RENO, Nev. — Apple, the world’s most profitable technology company, doesn’t design iPhones here. It doesn’t run AppleCare customer service from this city. And it doesn’t manufacture MacBooks or iPads anywhere nearby.

Yet, with a handful of employees in a small office here in Reno, Apple has done something central to its corporate strategy: it has avoided millions of dollars in taxes in California and 20 other states.

Apple’s headquarters are in Cupertino, Calif. By putting an office in Reno, just 200 miles away, to collect and invest the company’s profits, Apple sidesteps state income taxes on some of those gains.

California’s corporate tax rate is 8.84 percent. Nevada’s? Zero.

Setting up an office in Reno is just one of many legal methods Apple uses to reduce its worldwide tax bill by billions of dollars each year. As it has in Nevada, Apple has created subsidiaries in low-tax places like Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands — some little more than a letterbox or an anonymous office — that help cut the taxes it pays around the world.

Almost every major corporation tries to minimize its taxes, of course. For Apple, the savings are especially alluring because the company’s profits are so high. Wall Street analysts predict Apple could earn up to $45.6 billion in its current fiscal year — which would be a record for any American business.

Apple serves as a window on how technology giants have taken advantage of tax codes written for an industrial age and ill suited to today’s digital economy. Some profits at companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft derive not from physical goods but from royalties on intellectual property, like the patents on software that makes devices work. Other times, the products themselves are digital, like downloaded songs. It is much easier for businesses with royalties and digital products to move profits to low-tax countries than it is, say, for grocery stores or automakers. A downloaded application, unlike a car, can be sold from anywhere.

The growing digital economy presents a conundrum for lawmakers overseeing corporate taxation: although technology is now one of the nation’s largest and most valued industries, many tech companies are among the least taxed, according to government and corporate data. Over the last two years, the 71 technology companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index — including Apple, Google, Yahoo and Dell — reported paying worldwide cash taxes at a rate that, on average, was a third less than other S.& P. companies’. (Cash taxes may include payments for multiple years.)

Even among tech companies, Apple’s rates are low. And while the company has remade industries, ignited economic growth and delighted customers, it has also devised corporate strategies that take advantage of gaps in the tax code, according to former executives who helped create those strategies.

Apple, for instance, was among the first tech companies to designate overseas salespeople in high-tax countries in a manner that allowed them to sell on behalf of low-tax subsidiaries on other continents, sidestepping income taxes, according to former executives. Apple was a pioneer of an accounting technique known as the “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich,” which reduces taxes by routing profits through Irish subsidiaries and the Netherlands and then to the Caribbean. Today, that tactic is used by hundreds of other corporations — some of which directly imitated Apple’s methods, say accountants at those companies.

Without such tactics, Apple’s federal tax bill in the United States most likely would have been $2.4 billion higher last year, according to a recent study by a former Treasury Department economist, Martin A. Sullivan. As it stands, the company paid cash taxes of $3.3 billion around the world on its reported profits of $34.2 billion last year, a tax rate of 9.8 percent. (Apple does not disclose what portion of those payments was in the United States, or what portion is assigned to previous or future years.)

By comparison, Wal-Mart last year paid worldwide cash taxes of $5.9 billion on its booked profits of $24.4 billion, a tax rate of 24 percent, which is about average for non-tech companies.

Apple’s domestic tax bill has piqued particular curiosity among corporate tax experts because although the company is based in the United States, its profits — on paper, at least — are largely foreign. While Apple contracts out much of the manufacturing and assembly of its products to other companies overseas, the majority of Apple’s executives, product designers, marketers, employees, research and development, and retail stores are in the United States. Tax experts say it is therefore reasonable to expect that most of Apple’s profits would be American as well. The nation’s tax code is based on the concept that a company “earns” income where value is created, rather than where products are sold.

However, Apple’s accountants have found legal ways to allocate about 70 percent of its profits overseas, where tax rates are often much lower, according to corporate filings.

Neither the government nor corporations make tax returns public, and a company’s taxable income often differs from the profits disclosed in annual reports. Companies report their cash outlays for income taxes in their annual Form 10-K, but it is impossible from those numbers to determine precisely how much, in total, corporations pay to governments. In Apple’s last annual disclosure, the company listed its worldwide taxes — which includes cash taxes paid as well as deferred taxes and other charges — at $8.3 billion, an effective tax rate of almost a quarter of profits.

However, tax analysts and scholars said that figure most likely overstated how much the company would hand to governments because it included sums that might never be paid. “The information on 10-Ks is fiction for most companies,” said Kimberly Clausing, an economist at Reed College who specializes in multinational taxation. “But for tech companies it goes from fiction to farcical.”

Apple, in a statement, said it “has conducted all of its business with the highest of ethical standards, complying with applicable laws and accounting rules.” It added, “We are incredibly proud of all of Apple’s contributions.”

Apple “pays an enormous amount of taxes, which help our local, state and federal governments,” the statement also said. “In the first half of fiscal year 2012, our U.S. operations have generated almost $5 billion in federal and state income taxes, including income taxes withheld on employee stock gains, making us among the top payers of U.S. income tax.”

The statement did not specify how it arrived at $5 billion, nor did it address the issue of deferred taxes, which the company may pay in future years or decide to defer indefinitely. The $5 billion figure appears to include taxes ultimately owed by Apple employees.

The sums paid by Apple and other tech corporations is a point of contention in the company’s backyard.

A mile and a half from Apple’s Cupertino headquarters is De Anza College, a community college that Steve Wozniak, one of Apple’s founders, attended from 1969 to 1974. Because of California’s state budget crisis, De Anza has cut more than a thousand courses and 8 percent of its faculty since 2008.

Now, De Anza faces a budget gap so large that it is confronting a “death spiral,” the school’s president, Brian Murphy, wrote to the faculty in January. Apple, of course, is not responsible for the state’s financial shortfall, which has numerous causes. But the company’s tax policies are seen by officials like Mr. Murphy as symptomatic of why the crisis exists.

“I just don’t understand it,” he said in an interview. “I’ll bet every person at Apple has a connection to De Anza. Their kids swim in our pool. Their cousins take classes here. They drive past it every day, for Pete’s sake.

“But then they do everything they can to pay as few taxes as possible.”

Escaping State Taxes

In 2006, as Apple’s bank accounts and stock price were rising, company executives came here to Reno and established a subsidiary named Braeburn Capital to manage and invest the company’s cash. Braeburn is a variety of apple that is simultaneously sweet and tart.

Today, Braeburn’s offices are down a narrow hallway inside a bland building that sits across from an abandoned restaurant. Inside, there are posters of candy-colored iPods and a large Apple insignia, as well as a handful of desks and computer terminals.

When someone in the United States buys an iPhone, iPad or other Apple product, a portion of the profits from that sale is often deposited into accounts controlled by Braeburn, and then invested in stocks, bonds or other financial instruments, say company executives. Then, when those investments turn a profit, some of it is shielded from tax authorities in California by virtue of Braeburn’s Nevada address.

Since founding Braeburn, Apple has earned more than $2.5 billion in interest and dividend income on its cash reserves and investments around the globe. If Braeburn were located in Cupertino, where Apple’s top executives work, a portion of the domestic income would be taxed at California’s 8.84 percent corporate income tax rate.

But in Nevada there is no state corporate income tax and no capital gains tax.

What’s more, Braeburn allows Apple to lower its taxes in other states — including Florida, New Jersey and New Mexico — because many of those jurisdictions use formulas that reduce what is owed when a company’s financial management occurs elsewhere. Apple does not disclose what portion of cash taxes is paid to states, but the company reported that it owed $762 million in state income taxes nationwide last year. That effective state tax rate is higher than the rate of many other tech companies, but as Ms. Clausing and other tax analysts have noted, such figures are often not reliable guides to what is actually paid.

Dozens of other companies, including Cisco, Harley-Davidson and Microsoft, have also set up Nevada subsidiaries that bypass taxes in other states. Hundreds of other corporations reap similar savings by locating offices in Delaware.

But some in California are unhappy that Apple and other California-based companies have moved financial operations to tax-free states — particularly since lawmakers have offered them tax breaks to keep them in the state.

In 1996, 1999 and 2000, for instance, the California Legislature increased the state’s research and development tax credit, permitting hundreds of companies, including Apple, to avoid billions in state taxes, according to legislative analysts. Apple has reported tax savings of $412 million from research and development credits of all sorts since 1996.

Then, in 2009, after an intense lobbying campaign led by Apple, Cisco, Oracle, Intel and other companies, the California Legislature reduced taxes for corporations based in California but operating in other states or nations. Legislative analysts say the change will eventually cost the state government about $1.5 billion a year.

Such lost revenue is one reason California now faces a budget crisis, with a shortfall of more than $9.2 billion in the coming fiscal year alone. The state has cut some health care programs, significantly raised tuition at state universities, cut services to the disabled and proposed a $4.8 billion reduction in spending on kindergarten and other grades.

Apple declined to comment on its Nevada operations. Privately, some executives said it was unfair to criticize the company for reducing its tax bill when thousands of other companies acted similarly. If Apple volunteered to pay more in taxes, it would put itself at a competitive disadvantage, they argued, and do a disservice to its shareholders.

Indeed, Apple’s decisions have yielded benefits. After announcing one of the best quarters in its history last week, the company said it had net profits of $24.7 billion on revenues of $85.5 billion in the first half of the fiscal year, and more than $110 billion in the bank, according to company filings.

A Global Tax Strategy

Every second of every hour, millions of times each day, in living rooms and at cash registers, consumers click the “Buy” button on iTunes or hand over payment for an Apple product.

And with that, an international financial engine kicks into gear, moving money across continents in the blink of an eye. While Apple’s Reno office helps the company avoid state taxes, its international subsidiaries — particularly the company’s assignment of sales and patent royalties to other nations — help reduce taxes owed to the American and other governments.

For instance, one of Apple’s subsidiaries in Luxembourg, named iTunes S.à r.l., has just a few dozen employees, according to corporate documents filed in that nation and a current executive. The only indication of the subsidiary’s presence outside is a letterbox with a lopsided slip of paper reading “ITUNES SARL.”

Luxembourg has just half a million residents. But when customers across Europe, Africa or the Middle East — and potentially elsewhere — download a song, television show or app, the sale is recorded in this small country, according to current and former executives. In 2011, iTunes S.à r.l.’s revenue exceeded $1 billion, according to an Apple executive, representing roughly 20 percent of iTunes’s worldwide sales.

The advantages of Luxembourg are simple, say Apple executives. The country has promised to tax the payments collected by Apple and numerous other tech corporations at low rates if they route transactions through Luxembourg. Taxes that would have otherwise gone to the governments of Britain, France, the United States and dozens of other nations go to Luxembourg instead, at discounted rates.

“We set up in Luxembourg because of the favorable taxes,” said Robert Hatta, who helped oversee Apple’s iTunes retail marketing and sales for European markets until 2007. “Downloads are different from tractors or steel because there’s nothing you can touch, so it doesn’t matter if your computer is in France or England. If you’re buying from Luxembourg, it’s a relationship with Luxembourg.”

An Apple spokesman declined to comment on the Luxembourg operations.

Downloadable goods illustrate how modern tax systems have become increasingly ill equipped for an economy dominated by electronic commerce. Apple, say former executives, has been particularly talented at identifying legal tax loopholes and hiring accountants who, as much as iPhone designers, are known for their innovation. In the 1980s, for instance, Apple was among the first major corporations to designate overseas distributors as “commissionaires,” rather than retailers, said Michael Rashkin, Apple’s first director of tax policy, who helped set up the system before leaving in 1999.

To customers the designation was virtually unnoticeable. But because commissionaires never technically take possession of inventory — which would require them to recognize taxes — the structure allowed a salesman in high-tax Germany, for example, to sell computers on behalf of a subsidiary in low-tax Singapore. Hence, most of those profits would be taxed at Singaporean, rather than German, rates.

The Double Irish

In the late 1980s, Apple was among the pioneers in creating a tax structure — known as the Double Irish — that allowed the company to move profits into tax havens around the world, said Tim Jenkins, who helped set up the system as an Apple European finance manager until 1994.

Apple created two Irish subsidiaries — today named Apple Operations International and Apple Sales International — and built a glass-encased factory amid the green fields of Cork. The Irish government offered Apple tax breaks in exchange for jobs, according to former executives with knowledge of the relationship.

But the bigger advantage was that the arrangement allowed Apple to send royalties on patents developed in California to Ireland. The transfer was internal, and simply moved funds from one part of the company to a subsidiary overseas. But as a result, some profits were taxed at the Irish rate of approximately 12.5 percent, rather than at the American statutory rate of 35 percent. In 2004, Ireland, a nation of less than 5 million, was home to more than one-third of Apple’s worldwide revenues, according to company filings. (Apple has not released more recent estimates.)

Moreover, the second Irish subsidiary — the “Double” — allowed other profits to flow to tax-free companies in the Caribbean. Apple has assigned partial ownership of its Irish subsidiaries to Baldwin Holdings Unlimited in the British Virgin Islands, a tax haven, according to documents filed there and in Ireland. Baldwin Holdings has no listed offices or telephone number, and its only listed director is Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer, who lives and works in Cupertino. Baldwin apples are known for their hardiness while traveling.

Finally, because of Ireland’s treaties with European nations, some of Apple’s profits could travel virtually tax-free through the Netherlands — the Dutch Sandwich — which made them essentially invisible to outside observers and tax authorities.

Robert Promm, Apple’s controller in the mid-1990s, called the strategy “the worst-kept secret in Europe.”

It is unclear precisely how Apple’s overseas finances now function. In 2006, the company reorganized its Irish divisions as unlimited corporations, which have few requirements to disclose financial information.

However, tax experts say that strategies like the Double Irish help explain how Apple has managed to keep its international taxes to 3.2 percent of foreign profits last year, to 2.2 percent in 2010, and in the single digits for the last half-decade, according to the company’s corporate filings.

Apple declined to comment on its operations in Ireland, the Netherlands and the British Virgin Islands.

Apple reported in its last annual disclosures that $24 billion — or 70 percent — of its total $34.2 billion in pretax profits were earned abroad, and 30 percent were earned in the United States. But Mr. Sullivan, the former Treasury Department economist who today writes for the trade publication Tax Analysts, said that “given that all of the marketing and products are designed here, and the patents were created in California, that number should probably be at least 50 percent.”

If profits were evenly divided between the United States and foreign countries, Apple’s federal tax bill would have increased by about $2.4 billion last year, he said, because a larger amount of its profits would have been subject to the United States’ higher corporate income tax rate.

“Apple, like many other multinationals, is using perfectly legal methods to keep a significant portion of their profits out of the hands of the I.R.S.,” Mr. Sullivan said. “And when America’s most profitable companies pay less, the general public has to pay more.”

Other tax experts, like Edward D. Kleinbard, former chief of staff of the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, have reached similar conclusions.

“This tax avoidance strategy used by Apple and other multinationals doesn’t just minimize the companies’ U.S. taxes,” said Mr. Kleinbard, now a professor of tax law at the University of Southern California. “It’s German tax and French tax and tax in the U.K. and elsewhere.”

One downside for companies using such strategies is that when money is sent overseas, it cannot be returned to the United States without incurring a new tax bill.

However, that might change. Apple, which holds $74 billion offshore, last year aligned itself with more than four dozen companies and organizations urging Congress for a “repatriation holiday” that would permit American businesses to bring money home without owing large taxes. The coalition, which includes Google, Microsoft and Pfizer, has hired dozens of lobbyists to push for the measure, which has not yet come up for vote. The tax break would cost the federal government $79 billion over the next decade, according to a Congressional report.

Fallout in California

In one of his last public appearances before his death, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, addressed Cupertino’s City Council last June, seeking approval to build a new headquarters.

Most of the Council was effusive in its praise of the proposal. But one councilwoman, Kris Wang, had questions.

How will residents benefit? she asked. Perhaps Apple could provide free wireless Internet to Cupertino, she suggested, something Google had done in neighboring Mountain View.

“See, I’m a simpleton; I’ve always had this view that we pay taxes, and the city should do those things,” Mr. Jobs replied, according to a video of the meeting. “That’s why we pay taxes. Now, if we can get out of paying taxes, I’ll be glad to put up Wi-Fi.”

He suggested that, if the City Council were unhappy, perhaps Apple could move. The company is Cupertino’s largest taxpayer, with more than $8 million in property taxes assessed by local officials last year.

Ms. Wang dropped her suggestion.

Cupertino, Ms. Wang said in an interview, has real financial problems. “We’re proud to have Apple here,” said Ms. Wang, who has since left the Council. “But how do you get them to feel more connected?”

Other residents argue that Apple does enough as Cupertino’s largest employer and that tech companies, in general, have buoyed California’s economy. Apple’s workers eat in local restaurants, serve on local boards and donate to local causes. Silicon Valley’s many millionaires pay personal state income taxes. In its statement, Apple said its “international growth is creating jobs domestically, since we oversee most of our operations from California.”

“The vast majority of our global work force remains in the U.S.,” the statement continued, “with more than 47,000 full-time employees in all 50 states.”

Moreover, Apple has given nearby Stanford University more than $50 million in the last two years. The company has also donated $50 million to an African aid organization. In its statement, Apple said: “We have contributed to many charitable causes but have never sought publicity for doing so. Our focus has been on doing the right thing, not getting credit for it. In 2011, we dramatically expanded the number of deserving organizations we support by initiating a matching gift program for our employees.”

Still, some, including De Anza College’s president, Mr. Murphy, say the philanthropy and job creation do not offset Apple’s and other companies’ decisions to circumvent taxes. Within 20 minutes of the financially ailing school are the global headquarters of Google, Facebook, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Cisco.

“When it comes time for all these companies — Google and Apple and Facebook and the rest — to pay their fair share, there’s a knee-jerk resistance,” Mr. Murphy said. “They’re philosophically antitax, and it’s decimating the state.”

“But I’m not complaining,” he added. “We can’t afford to upset these guys. We need every dollar we can get.”

Additional reporting was contributed by Keith Bradsher in Hong Kong, Siem Eikelenboom in Amsterdam, Dean Greenaway in the British Virgin Islands, Scott Sayare in Luxembourg and Jason Woodard in Singapore.

An installation view of “Frank Stella: Black, Aluminum, Copper Paintings,” at L&M Arts through June 2.

By ROBERTA SMITH
NY Times Published: April 26, 2012

The handsome show of Frank Stella’s early paintings at L&M Arts could not be better timed. Abstract art, especially of a Minimalist mien, is on the uptick right now, with a few too many young artists acting as if they have invented the wheel, especially where brushy or severely simplified monochromes are concerned.

Perhaps this is to be expected. Art is not a science; it does not proceed in a neat, linear progression. Artists often circle back, picking up ideas that their predecessors left undeveloped and trying to push them further. Still, a blast from the past never hurts: the artistic present can never know too much about what has come before.

The rare museum-quality exhibition that is “Frank Stella: Black, Aluminum, Copper Paintings” is just that kind of blast. It features 13 of the adamant, quietly pulsing, exceedingly frontal paintings that Mr. Stella made in New York in the three and a half years after he arrived here in the summer of 1958, fresh out of Princeton.

This amounts to more early Stellas than have been exhibited in New York since the survey of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970. They provide a heady sense of the first few fastest-moving years of his development, when he helped bring the Abstract Expressionist chapter of New York School painting to a close and lay the foundation for Minimalism.

On view are examples of the Black Paintings series, with which he announced himself to the New York art world in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1959 “Sixteen Americans” exhibition, as well as works from his Aluminum and Copper series, unveiled in his first and second solo shows at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1960 and 1962. All the paintings feature repeating bands or stripes of a single color applied to canvases that start out rectangular and end up emphatically shaped, resembling big letters. Also included is “Delta,” a wonderfully shaggy, black-over-dark-red predecessor of these more classic stripe paintings.

These works represent the cornerstone of Mr. Stella’s reputation, the Stellas whose historical importance, as with Picasso’s Cubist paintings, is most widely, if somewhat predictably, accepted. And just as the decimated forms of Cubism introduce an integration between image and surface, the Stellas here progressively articulate a new agreement between painting as image and as object. They hark back to a time when flatness was abstract painting’s primary goal, and the physical facts of the medium were starting to be endlessly parsed — beginning with shaped canvases — in a process that continues today. No artist’s work embodied these pursuits as rigorously as Mr. Stella’s; in the paintings at L&M he laid down the tracks that others followed.

But in this show you also see a young painter edging his way, with some setbacks, toward his first mature statements, making progress that is at times as much physical and technical as anything else. The unevenness and general handmade roughness of the Black Paintings is especially striking. Greatly influenced by Jasper Johns’s flag paintings, Mr. Stella sought an even more rigorous logic between physical and visual by using parallel bands of black that either reiterate or run diagonally to the edges of the canvas.

But the Frank Stella of the Black Paintings was not yet the Frank Stella who famously said, in 1966, “What you see is what you see” — the epitome of a literal, nothing-but-the-facts approach to the medium. Beyond their apparent logic, these early works are also broodingly Romantic, their mood underscored by titles that flirt with darkness, chaos and otherness.

“Bethlehem’s Hospital” takes it name from the London mental institution sometimes known as Bedlam. “Die Fahne hoch!” (“The Flag on High”) echoes a phrase from a Nazi marching song. The most famous title is “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Makes You Free”), the words that were splayed demonically above the gates to Auschwitz and other concentration camps.

Some of the Black Paintings are much stronger than others, with “Bethlehem’s Hospital” and “Arbeit Macht Frei” being especially murky. Their stripes, painted over black washes, are sometimes barely discernible; in certain areas they seem all but monochromatic, which gives them a youthful awkwardness and a reliclike, not-quite-alive aspect.

In later works from the series, the black stripes are laid over raw canvas and the white glimmering between them is lively beyond doubt. This is the case with the cruciform patterns of the tall, heraldic “Die Fahne hoch!” (which also reads as a homage to Mr. Johns’s work); the radiating diamond pattern of “Zambezi”; and the velvety cascade of “Point of Pines,” in which parallel diagonal stripes slant downward from the vertical center line of the canvas.

“Point of Pines” has an especially resonant balance of motif and title, since the diagonals repeatedly meet at a point and suggest a pine tree in highly abstracted form. But the layered associations persist: The painting was named for a gay cruising beach north of Boston, while the inspiration for “Zambezi” was a Harlem nightclub that featured male and female impersonators.

In a sense the Black Paintings pay homage to Abstract Expressionism as they bid it farewell. But with the Aluminum series Mr. Stella is free and clear. There is nothing moody about their silvery, reflective surfaces or about the dazzling logic with which the bands of aluminum paint jog in and out in response to the discreetly shaped canvases, which have cutaway notches and squares at their corners, sides and centers.

The titles tend toward exotic if not downright flashy. “Averroes” and “Avicenna” are named for Arab philosophers (of the 11th and 12th centuries); “Marquis de Portago” commemorates a charismatic Spanish racecar driver who died in a fiery crash in 1957. The gaps between the stripes are much more definite than in the Black Paintings, since Mr. Stella outlined them in pencil, but a certain lack of neatness persists, especially when the stripes turn corners, contributing to ebullient play between figure and ground.

The ruddy Copper Paintings, named for mining towns in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, torque this play toward the sculptural with emphatically shaped canvases. “Telluride” is a big T; “Pagosa Springs” is an immense, gate-like H; and “Creede I” and Creede II” are identical L’s, installed so close together here that they might seem incomplete without each other.

In these works Mr. Stella starts using tape, making the gaps between the stripes perfectly regular, which decreases some of the handmade quality. But the paintings are more adamant than ever, and their sheer bluntness and simplicity still impress, while the crucifixlike power of “Telluride,” in particular, confirms that what you see is never all you see.

Their boldness hints at the punch and scale of the more colorful and decorative “Irregular Polygon and Protractor” series to which Mr. Stella would turn in the late 1960s, after several more years of stripe paintings. They also foreshadow his move into three-dimensional reliefs, which would begin with his “Polish Village” series in 1970. Since then, he has left the works at L&M far behind, producing increasingly bulky, increasingly baroque reliefs, and is frequently viewed as an artist in decline. But the underlying continuities of his art should not be underestimated, and his velocity and determination to keep changing are as evident now as they were when he started out.

“Frank Stella: Black, Aluminum, Copper Paintings” runs through June 2 at
L and M Gallery, 45 East 78th Street, Manhattan; (212) 861-0020

L and M Gallery

By RICHARD M. RYAN and WILLIAM S. RYAN
NY Times Published: April 27, 2012

WHY are political and religious figures who campaign against gay rights so often implicated in sexual encounters with same-sex partners?

In recent years, Ted Haggard, an evangelical leader who preached that homosexuality was a sin, resigned after a scandal involving a former male prostitute; Larry Craig, a United States senator who opposed including sexual orientation in hate-crime legislation, was arrested on suspicion of lewd conduct in a men’s bathroom; and Glenn Murphy Jr., a leader of the Young Republican National Convention and an opponent of same-sex marriage, pleaded guilty to a lesser charge after being accused of sexually assaulting another man.

One theory is that homosexual urges, when repressed out of shame or fear, can be expressed as homophobia. Freud famously called this process a “reaction formation” — the angry battle against the outward symbol of feelings that are inwardly being stifled. Even Mr. Haggard seemed to endorse this idea when, apologizing after his scandal for his anti-gay rhetoric, he said, “I think I was partially so vehement because of my own war.”

It’s a compelling theory — and now there is scientific reason to believe it. In this month’s issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we and our fellow researchers provide empirical evidence that homophobia can result, at least in part, from the suppression of same-sex desire.

Our paper describes six studies conducted in the United States and Germany involving 784 university students. Participants rated their sexual orientation on a 10-point scale, ranging from gay to straight. Then they took a computer-administered test designed to measure their implicit sexual orientation. In the test, the participants were shown images and words indicative of hetero- and homosexuality (pictures of same-sex and straight couples, words like “homosexual” and “gay”) and were asked to sort them into the appropriate category, gay or straight, as quickly as possible. The computer measured their reaction times.

The twist was that before each word and image appeared, the word “me” or “other” was flashed on the screen for 35 milliseconds — long enough for participants to subliminally process the word but short enough that they could not consciously see it. The theory here, known as semantic association, is that when “me” precedes words or images that reflect your sexual orientation (for example, heterosexual images for a straight person), you will sort these images into the correct category faster than when “me” precedes words or images that are incongruent with your sexual orientation (for example, homosexual images for a straight person). This technique, adapted from similar tests used to assess attitudes like subconscious racial bias, reliably distinguishes between self-identified straight individuals and those who self-identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual.

Using this methodology we identified a subgroup of participants who, despite self-identifying as highly straight, indicated some level of same-sex attraction (that is, they associated “me” with gay-related words and pictures faster than they associated “me” with straight-related words and pictures). Over 20 percent of self-described highly straight individuals showed this discrepancy.

Notably, these “discrepant” individuals were also significantly more likely than other participants to favor anti-gay policies; to be willing to assign significantly harsher punishments to perpetrators of petty crimes if they were presumed to be homosexual; and to express greater implicit hostility toward gay subjects (also measured with the help of subliminal priming). Thus our research suggests that some who oppose homosexuality do tacitly harbor same-sex attraction.

What leads to this repression? We found that participants who reported having supportive and accepting parents were more in touch with their implicit sexual orientation and less susceptible to homophobia. Individuals whose sexual identity was at odds with their implicit sexual attraction were much more frequently raised by parents perceived to be controlling, less accepting and more prejudiced against homosexuals.

It’s important to stress the obvious: Not all those who campaign against gay men and lesbians secretly feel same-sex attractions. But at least some who oppose homosexuality are likely to be individuals struggling against parts of themselves, having themselves been victims of oppression and lack of acceptance. The costs are great, not only for the targets of anti-gay efforts but also often for the perpetrators. We would do well to remember that all involved deserve our compassion.

Richard M. Ryan is a professor of psychology, psychiatry and education at the University of Rochester. William S. Ryan is a doctoral student in psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.