This new series of art works looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics.

Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on.

My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books.

Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day.   more »

Joe Zamecki thinks the rise of atheism is in part a response to the overtly religious Mr Bush, whose father once declared: "I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots."

Mr Zamecki said: "The war in Iraq, which was partly justified as a religious war, has turned a lot of people off religion. The internet has helped our movement. There is a whole generation of young Americans that is exposed to free and open debate."

Blogger Hemant Mehta, 24, who writes under the pen name "friendlyatheist", regularly debates with Christian fundamentalists online. He wrote: "We are not the bogeymen we have been made out to be for so long."

The atheists still have a mountain to climb. In a Republican presidential debate last week, candidates mentioned their faith 16 times, and three said that they did not believe in evolution.   more »

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, one of the heavyweights in the Socialist Party, described the election results—the third defeat in a presidential contest since François Mitterrand left office in 1995—as a disaster, for which the failure of the party to move sufficiently to the right was to blame.

It was now high time to renew and open the party and to develop it in a social-democratic direction, he insisted.

Similar conclusions were drawn by party chairman François Hollande. “We have not sufficiently understood the need to open up, to broaden our base”, he commented on the defeat.

In reality, the exact opposite is the case. The political rise of a right-wing figure like Sarkozy is the result of the shift to the right by the Socialist Party, the Communist Party and the petty-bourgeois left over the last three decades.   more »

The Democratic Party is a capitalist party; it represents corporate and financial interests.

It cannot and will not remedy any of the deepest distress of the population. Preserving and extending the position of American capitalism on a world scale is its chief and overriding concern as well.

While it postures, with the help of the New York Times, as an opponent of Bush and Cheney, and of course there are sharp tactical differences, it won’t break from this orbit.

The present situation is untenable. The population voted to end the war, and it gets more war. Not only that, the social gap is accelerating, and the Democrats have not even proposed the most timid means of closing it.   more »

Long Live al-Qaeda!

"And lest Bush worry, I congratulate him

on the success of his security plan,

and I invite him on the occasion

for a glass of juice,

but in the cafeteria of the Iraqi parliament

in the middle of the Green Zone"

   more »

Keywords: alqaeda, tape, jihad, propaganda