Portside

We can no longer allow the billionaires and their think tanks or the corporate media to set the agenda. We need to educate, organize and mobilize the working families of our country to stand up for their rights. We need to make government work for all the people, not just the 1 percent.

New Year's Fireworks: While the statistics prove that the immigrants, their labor, their taxes and their children are actually a boon to the economy, those on the right only increase their ranting about the “continuing misuse of European travel freedom for poverty migration”, helped by all those in the media who stoke fears of “free loaders and criminals”.

It was clear from the beginning national IAM officials were upset with the Nov 13 overwhelming rejection of their deal with Boeing and they seemed to be making the point more emphatically by ordering a new vote. Obviously disappointed with the national leadership, a longtime IAM member told me “this rushed vote is not right,” and pointed out “35% of our members are on vacation during this period,” unable to get the information and participate in a democratic discussion

We can wrest back control of our economy, and finally our political system, from corporate speculators only by building local movements that decentralize economic power through the creation of hundreds of publicly owned state, county and city banks.

While Washington was stuck in the grip of the politics of obstruction, grass-roots activists did their part, scoring some major wins for economic justice, civil liberties and democracy. As we near the end of the year, here are some of the biggest progressive wins we saw.

Operation Condor was a coordinated effort by dictatorships in Latin American countries, to track down and kill political opponents in their various countries—an effort that was deliberately aided, particularly during the mid-to-late ‘70s, by the CIA.

The judge's cited source, the 9/11 Commission Report, doesn't actually include the account he gives in the ruling. What’s more, experts say the NSA could have avoided the pre-9/11 failure even without the metadata surveillance program.

As American energy production booms, thousands face pipelines in their backyards. Pipelines carry flammable, toxic materials next to homes, and many experts say they’re poorly monitored by the government. Just 110 federal inspectors supervise the nation’s 2.5 million miles of existing pipelines. Oversight for new pipelines carrying oil and NGL—both classed as “hazardous liquids”—is even laxer, say critics.

Bigotry and ignorance join forces to deny the existence of black nuns in Europe. No surprise that it's bad history.

These computers are not programmed instead, connections between the circuits are “weighted” according to correlations in data that the processor has already “learned.” Those weights are then altered as data flows in to the chip, causing them to change their values. That generates a signal that travels to other components and, in reaction, changes the neural network, programming the next actions much the same way that information alters human thoughts and actions.