The photo comes from wikimedia.org
"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
The photo comes from
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"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
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If you want to send me GPG-encrypted mail, do not trust key servers! Some of them have phony keys under my name and email address, made by someone else as a trick. See gpg.html for my real key.
Richard Stallman has cancer. Fortunately it is slow-growing and manageable follicular lymphoma. Treatment put it into remission, and he can expect to live many more years. However, he now has to be even more careful not to catch Covid-19.
The largest part of the site is the political notes, and they are typically updated every day.
I'm looking for people to
US citizens: call on big banks not to harass non-citizens for the bully.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call on your state attorney general to sue to block the persecutor's new Medicaid Work Requirements.
If they go into effect, the complex paperwork would be an insuperable burden for many of the handicaped veterans, who would need to satisfy and convince bureaucrats whose mission is to resist.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call on Senator Schumer and Rep. Jeffries to be leaders for climate defense.
US citizens: call on Congress to block the perverse "SAVE America" that would require voters to show up-to-date federal ID cards with their current addresses.
Poor US citizens can't afford the fees to update them when they change address (which they are compelled to do often), so this would have an effect resembling that of the "poll tax" that southern states used to disenfranchise blacks. Those states achieved racial discrimination indirectly by using a "grandfather clause" to exempt whites from the tax. Its proposed new replacement would, I expect, disenfranchise poor people regardless of race.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on the Federal Reserve to block obscure local banks from setting up nationwide high-interest loan businesses.
Us citizens: call on your congresscritter to support the resolution to protect voting rights.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.
To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.
Please spread the word.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to support what is being called the "AI for the people" act, but to remove the marketing hype term "AI" from the bill.
Here is what I wrote about the term "Artificial Intelligence" in the letter I sent.
Please join me in refusing to repeat the marketing hype slogan, "Artificial Intelligence", that the companies like to use. Let's limit the term "intelligence" to systems that can know and understand, within some domain — which the chatbots of today can't do. For more explanation, see https://gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#ArtificialIntelligence.Despite the technology's great flaws, a handful of billionaires and tech oligarchs stand to capture trillions of dollars in wealth that needs to be shared with the rest of society.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
I'm looking for a cartoonist who would like to draw cartoons for me once in a while. If you're interested, please write to rms, which refers to me, at the location gnu period org.
Boycott Chevron, in the name of Steven Donziger.
* Abandoned coalmines and oil and gas wells are now one of the biggest sources of the powerful greenhouse gas methane, new data shows, and little effort is being made to clean them up.*
I expect that the fossil fuel companies to divest themselves from old mines and wells in ways that will avoid liability for them — just as they sometimes disconnect themselves from responsibility for supporting former workers.
So I suggest making it a felony to implement a restructuring of business or assets in a way that is likely to result predictably in strand assets that carry financial responsibilities with no one capable of shouldering the responsibilities.
A pitifully weak attempt to solve a real problem: asking for a federal law that would permit victims of domestic abuse and stalking to demand that data brokers delete information about them.
Data, once collected, will be abused. The way to prevent that abuse is to facilitate refusing to hand it over in the first place.
Here is my proposal for protecting the specific people known to be in particular danger, and everyone else who could be harmed if individuals, businesses or governments use their personal data against them without a search warrant: require services to be available anonymously.
The selfish interest of those who keep trade secrets is rational but antisocial. In many cases the only harm it does is to hold back the general advance of technology. But sometimes it does really nasty things. For digital hardware and software, it often gives companies a way to subjugate their users. Regarding use of toxic chemicals, it endangers public health.
Why would legislators pass laws to "protect" companies instead of protecting the people they harm? I suspect it is partly because these companies are influential and the legislators seek their support, and partly because the legislators ask them for campaign funds.
But it is also partly the result of the mindset of "trickle down", which assumes that the only way to get more funds for the state is to let increase the size of the economy by letting companies have what they want. Unfortunately, what they want is often to be allowed to harm the public.
Most Democrats in Congress got corrupted this way in the 80s and 90s. (The exceptions are the progressive Democrats.) Now in the UK Starmer is guiding Labour into that sort of corruption.
Clearly our laws should say that any public need to know about the presence of toxic substances in a business facility overrides the desire to keep them secret.
Whether the owners are Chinese is a question that there is no need to ask, because the state should never give money to a business "to support it." Instead it should offer to lend money to the company for suitable repayment, or else buy equity at a fair price.
These two ways of supporting a company avoid giving the owners an opporunity to rip off the state -- which the company's owners are likely to try to do, if they can, regardless of which country they are from.
With a policy like this, it wouldn't matter which country the company's owners are from.
Here are some quotations that I particularly like.
You can now read the political notes on Mastodon.
Witnesses say that the deportation thugs are making false statements to protect the one of them who shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo dead.
This is a repeated pattern, and presents a reason to suspect that their refusal to use body cameras and other cameras is specifically intended to help them protect each other from valid criminal accusations.
Among the reasons for rejecting the idea of "intelligent design" of the human body are the shockingly stupid instances of bad design in it.
Occasionally someone has hands with six fingers. Could the human body have been designed by an LLM?
The wrecker's henchmen just adopted a narrow standard of "harm" for the Endangered Species Act, in order to enable business activities that risk wiping out endangered species.
The saboteur in chief wants to put a global heating denialist in charge of official US government reports on the advance of global heating.
Refuting the myths that people use to deny the danger of global heating.
The New York Times reported on apparent flaws in the plane that Qatar gave the corrupter. Now the government is demanding they identify their sources, saying it wants to prosecute them.
The notion of "intelligent design" of humans and other living species is false -- our structure came about by step-by-step improvement with no way to eliminate kludges.
* New [magat] rules would undermine longstanding research practices. It's death by a thousand cuts.*
*How to plan for an [free] election [even though] leaders are trying to subvert [it].*
*UK must cap political donations to stop the rich buying influence.*
The US must do this too, but the question of how it can be done is different in each country because of the difference in constitutions./p>
Analyzing arguments people cite on the issue of free speech.
The persecutor has increased, not decreased, the hunt for people to deport (even illegally).
It attracts less public attention now, because his henchmen have pulled back from the practice of operating with blatant crueity in Democratic cities to overawe and terrify. That backfired against them in several cities, including Minneapolis and Los Angeles, with the effect of galvanizing Americans against him. So now their plan is to collect ever-more surveillance data so they can find lots of unauthorized immigrants, as well as many authorized immigrants that they can falsely accuse of being unauthorized, or target for fabricated accusations of political crime.
An Israeli border police officer threw a flashbang into a car then shut its door from the outside. When the passengers (Palestinians) ran out the other side doors, he shot at them.
This sort of thing happens every day. (I heard from Israeli leftists decades ago that the border police were generally cruel to Palestinians, more so than soldiers.) What is unusual is that that policeman is being investigated for these acts. But past patterns suggest this will not lead to significant disciplinary action.
Killing injured Palestinians by keeping them apart from ambulances is also frequent practice.
Hussam Abu Safiya, *one of Gaza's most prominent doctors is almost unrecognisable because of severe injuries inflicted in Israeli [prison], his lawyer has said, and faces "tangible danger to his life" after being held for 18 months without charge or trial.*
*Extreme heat now affects one in three people globally, study finds. Rising temperatures making it hard even for young, healthy people to safely do normal physical tasks in many regions.*
If the UK borrows enough to carry out needed spending, it will fall into a debt-inflation spiral, according to a government economic monitor.
This is one of the many bad aspects of the decision to borrow needed funds rather than get them by taxing the rich. The world will become more and more unjust unless we increase the share of production that goes to the non-rich. We need to pick the least bad way of increasing taxes only on people who are more-or-less rich, and push it through.
Graham Platner has dropped out of the election for senator from Maine, after an accusation of rape. Now there is the question of how to choose another candidate.
The word "rape" clearly states the gravity of the crime he is accused of. Why, I wonder, do so many journalists seek to substitute the vague term "sexual assault", which could mean anything from stealing a kiss to rape. Such vagueness is bad for justice.
I hope that "moderate" (plutocratist) Democrats won't succeed in imposing one of themselves, since that replacement would fail to fight for the non-rich.
Two Muslim governments (Turkey and Egypt) have seized on a self-designated "gay cruise" as an opportunity to demonstrate their religious bigotry, by refusing the ship entry.
Turkey is ostensibly a secular democracy, but nowadays the tyrant Erdoğan is undermining both of those allegiances.
*US chemical accidents rising as [persecutor] rolls back protections, report finds.*
The four factors of the apocalypse:
global heating, global hating,
global eating, global mating.
Copy this button (courtesy of R.Siddharth) to express your rejection of Facebook.
Non-oppressive Commercial E-books
Facebook's face recognition demonstrates a threat to everyone's privacy. I therefore ask people not to put photos of me on Facebook; you can do likewise.
Of course, Facebook is bad for many other reasons as well.
I'd like to make a list of countries that do not require a national identity card, and have no plans to adopt one. If you live in or have confirmed knowledge of such a country, please send email to rms at gnu.org.
Here's my list of countries with no national ID cards and no plans for one: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK. Australia's previous government tried to institute national ID cards, but the Labor government dropped the plan.
India has mostly finished imposing a national biometric ID number in a grand act of oppression.
Switzerland has national ID cards which are optional, but they or some other government ID card are needed for some purposes.
Iceland doesn't have ID cards as such, but they have ID numbers that citizens are forced to use frequently. For example, the national ID number is often required to rent a video or use a gym.
Denmark issues non-photo ID cards with a "person number", and many services use this card to identify people.
Norway will impose a national biometric ID card.
Ireland - national ID card by stealth.
ACLU: the five dangers of national ID cards.
Wikipedia has a list of identity card policies by country.
Stay away from certain countries because of their bad immigration policies.
Avoid flight connections in these airports because of their treatment of passengers.
People often ask how I manage to continue devoting myself to progressive activism (such as the free software movement) for years without burning out. The best way I can answer is by recommending a book, The Lifelong Activist by Hillary Rettig.
I disagree with the book on one theoretical point in the last part of the book: we shouldn't think of political activism as being marketing and sales, because those terms refer to business, and politics is something much more important than mere business. However, this doesn't diminish the value of the book's practical advice about borrowing techniques from marketing and sales.
Disclosure: I am friends with the author.
Personal Declaration of Richard Stallman and Euclides Mance on Solidarity Economy and Free Software.
I have reposted some of Rick Falkvinge's articles. As posted on his site, you can't see them in a browser without running some nonfree Javascript code which is apparently non-free. These versions show the same text, without the obstacle.
These are my political articles that are not related to the GNU operating system or free software. For GNU-related articles, see the GNU philosophy directory. You can also download copies of my book, Free Software, Free Society, 3rd edition.
"Those who profess to favor freedom, yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."Frederick Douglass, American Abolitionist, Letter to an associate, 1849
Here are notes about various issues I care about, usually with links to
more information. The current notes are
here. For all previous
notes, see this page.
See this page for information on efforts to maintain links in the political notes.
Political notes about the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy are being archived on their own page.
Richard Stallman's bio and publicity photos, and other things of interest to the press, have been moved to a separate page.
The Free Software Song, by Richard M. Stallman. You can listen to a performance of the song: Free Software Song performed by Thor Here is a variant of this song called "The Free Firmware Song".
Earth under attack from planet Koch.On doxing, and how to spell it.
A Spanish cartoon: La Ruleta
Española. 
Here I am wearing my "power tie".
Wine snobs get their comeuppance.
Here I am struggling to open a bottle of water.
My application to an join Marian Henley's ex-boyfriends list.
My funny poetry and song parodies.
A song parody, Colors of the Lisp, by Jefferson Carpenter.
The text to a filk song, Johnny v. N., by Paul Rubin.
My Puns in English (Little Leaguer, August 2019).
My Puns in Spanish (New pun: Apostasía April 2019)
My Puns in French (New pun: Microsoft à l'école July 2019)
My Puns in Italian (New pun: Quale pesce fa starnutire? New 10/2018)
My Puns in German (New 02/2016)
Linguistic Swifties (Now with: Wintu, Penutian, Cochiti, Taos, and Towa.)
--Saint
IGNUcius-- The Church of Emacs will soon
be officially listed by at least one person as his religion for
census purposes.
There are no godfathers in the Church of Emacs, since there are no gods, but you can be someone's editorfather.
Stallman Does Dallas: "I have to warn you that Texans have been known to have an adverse reaction to my personality…"
The Dalai Lama today announced the official release of Yellow Hat GNU/Linux.
I found a funny song about the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act (officially the Sonny Bono Copyright Act) which extended copyright retroactively by 20 years on works made as early as the 1920s.
If you are a geek and read Spanish, you will love Raulito el Friki, who said "Hello, world!" immediately after he was born. Here's an archive of this now-defunct comic strip.
Sleeping with Stallman at MIT.
ESR's favorite programming language: Objectivist C.
No Kludges in Cluj (June 2014)
Made for You (December 2012) (local copy) Esperanto translation
A science fiction story: Jinnetic Engineering (in Portuguese, Farsi, Spanish, Armenian, Russian, French, and Italian).My book of essays about the philosophy of Software Freedom, is available from the GNU Press.
Avec des chapeaux French song parody.
My radio program of Music from Georgia, originally broadcast on WUOG in Athens, Georgia on Oct 13, 2014.
Quantum Theory and Abortion Rights
A proposal for gender neutrality in Spanish, suitable for both speech and writing.
On Hacking: In June 2000, while visiting Korea, I did a fun hack that clearly illustrates the original and true meaning of the word "hacker".
Predicting the attack on Pearl Harbor
I would like to thank:
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