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"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
I'm looking for speaking invitations for a trip in January and February that will include some part of Europe, then India, then some other part of Europe.
The first visit to Europe will be roughly Jan 16 to 22. The visit to India will start Jan 22 and can continue into February. The second visit to Europe will be after that. Those dates are flexible.
One advantage of this period for you is that the intercontinental flights are already covered, so you won't need to pay for that.
If you are interested in inviting me, and you have a venue to use and a public to invite, please email me soon with "speaking invitation" in the Subject field, using the name rms and the host gnu dot org.
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This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman.
The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of
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the GNU Project.
For the sake of separation, this site has always been
hosted elsewhere and managed separately.
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.
I urge you to vote in Democratic primaries for the progressive candidate, if there is one. And in the final election I urge you to vote for Democrats, unless a liberal independent had a good chance of winning.
The largest part of the site is the political notes, and they are typically updated every day.
I'm looking for people toUS citizens: phone your senators and tell them to reject Billy Long for head of the IRS. When in Congress he proposed to eliminate income tax so as to tax low-income people more with a national sales tax.
Every sales tax falls unfairly hard on low-income people. We ought to replace them with taxes that fall mainly on those who can afford to pay them.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on the Senate: No Recess Appointments! Don't Abdicate Your Duty to Vet Trump's Nominees.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on Congress to prevent any cuts to Social Security. Stop any efforts to privatize this critical government program.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
I'm looking for speaking invitations for a trip in January and February that will include some part of Europe, then India, then some other part of Europe.
The first visit to Europe will be roughly Jan 16 to 22. The visit to India will start Jan 22 and can continue into February. The second visit to Europe will be after that. Those dates are flexible.
One advantage of this period for you is that the intercontinental flights are already covered, so you won't need to pay for that.
If you are interested in inviting me, and you have a venue to use and a public to invite, please email me soon with "speaking invitation" in the Subject field, using the name rms and the host gnu dot org.
US citizens: call on Lula and Brazil to be the world's climate leaders in COP 30 next year.
US citizens: call on the Senate: don't allow the wrecker to make recess appointments. Don't abdicate your duty to vet the wrecker's nominees.
US citizens: call on Congress to oppose any cuts to, and any efforts to privatize, Social Security and Medicare.
US citizens: call on Biden to Pardon Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators urging them to extend the premium tax credits in the current session of Congress.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on Congress to protect Social Security and Medicare from the cuts that the wrecker, the musk-ox, and that wiseacre of Oz want to make.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: fight back against the corrupter's proposed Big Money cabinet.
US citizens: oppose the muskrat's plan to slash spending for nonrich Amercans.
In the US: support striking IKEA workers.
Here's how to make the actionnetwork.org letter campaign linked above work without running the site's nonfree JavaScript code.
First, make sure you have deactivated JavaScrupt in your browser or are using the LibreJS plug-in.
I have done the next step for you: I added `?nowrapper=true' to the end of the campaign URL before posting it above. That should bring you to a page that starts with, "Letter campaigns will not work without javascript!"
They indeed won't work without some manual help, but the following simple method seems adequate for many of them, including this one.
To start, fill in the personal information answers in the box on the right side of the page. That's how you say who's sending the letter.
Then click the "START WRITING" button. That will take you to a page that can't function without nonfree JavaScript code. (To ensure it doesn't function perversely by running that nonfree code, you can enable LibreJS or disable JavaScript.) You can finish sending without that code By editing its URL in the browser's address bar, as follows:
First, go to the string &redirect=... and delete everything from there to the end of that URL. Then insert `&nowrapper=true'. Then tell the browser to visit that URL. This should give you a version of the page that works without JavaScript. Enter the subject and body of your letter. Finally, click on the "SEND LETTER" button, and you're done.
This method seems to work for letter campaigns that send the letters to a fixed list of recipients, the same recipients for every sender. Editing and revisiting the URL is the only additional step needed to bypass the nonfree JavaScript code. I'm sure you'll agree it is a small effort compared with the result of supporting the campaign without opening your computer to unjust (and potentially malicious) software.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators and tell them to extend the ACA Advance Premium Tax Credits, to avoid a large increase in the cost of medical insurance.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: Oppose the creation of Musk's "Department of Government Efficiency" (or, better described, Department of Government Evisceration").
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.
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.
It is exciting that SB 976 turns towards restricting recommendation algorithms. But these options should not be limited to minors — every user should have this choice. (Please do not refer to teenagers as "children"; that feeds the US tendency to treat them like children and retard their development.)
However, I suggest taking a step beyond just choosing to use or not use the platform's addiction system. Recommendation algorithms should be completely separated from platforms!
If you want to use a nontrivial recommendation algorithm, you should be able to choose it yourself and use it anonymously. You could send it the URLs you want it to base its choices on. These might be some of the pages you had visited, and perhaps pages you had not visited.
Then it should send you its recommendations. You could pass all, or just some, or none of those recommendations to the platform to look at them.
AB 1949 is admirable because it gives a small boost to privacy for users of all ages, not only for children. It isn't enough, though — users should also be guaranteed the right and possibility to access through the Tor network and to use aliases. And collection of a user's data by the state should require a warrant against the user.
Here are some quotations that I particularly like.
You can now read the political notes on Mastodon.
Amazon workers in various US cities are now on strike.
The musk rat has been failing military security examinations because of refusing to tell the examiners about some of his meetings with foreign officials. Some US and allied officials see him as a risk.
Emperor Tusk the First killed an urgently needed omnibus spending bill by ordering Republicans to vote it down, and spreading false criticisms on ex-Twitter.
Bernie Sanders referred to him as "President Musk", but "emperor" fits better, since he is nothing like a president. Like Augustus in Rome, he has no official position, but through his riches he compels legislators to bow to him. Of course, there are many differences in detail; history does not repeat itself exactly.
This is very dangerous to the republic, since after some years of this it will be presented as normal and expected by the powerful voices.
US citizens: phone your senators and tell them to reject Billy Long for head of the IRS. When in Congress he proposed to eliminate income tax so as to tax low-income people more with a national sales tax.
Every sales tax falls unfairly hard on low-income people. We ought to replace them with taxes that fall mainly on those who can afford to pay them.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on Congress to prevent any cuts to Social Security. Stop any efforts to privatize this critical government program.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
It is fashionable to adopt policies whereby a computer system judges how a certain person deserves to be treated, but they "put a human in the loop" by giving per the job of looking at the computer's recommendations and authorizing them or not.
Experiment shows that such systems systematically fail. The article explains why they fail. What it comes down to is that "putting a human in the loop" is ineffective at correcting the computer system's errors, but instead has the practical effect of serving to excuse those errors.
The article linked to just above displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither one.) I denounce bigotry, and normally I will not link to articles that practice it. But I make exceptions for some articles because I consider them important — and I label them like this.
The experience with Israel's machine learning target selector system tends to confirm this conclusion.
*Bernie Sanders Says Defeating Oligarchy Now Most Urgent Issue.*
*I utterly reject the assertion that Ireland is anti-Israel. Ireland is pro-peace, pro-human rights and pro-international law.* Well said!
* Experts express fear — and resilience — as they prepare for [the wrecker]'s potential attacks on climate research.*
Climate science depends on measurements and records of measurements. Sometimes the same measurements are made in the same way for decades so that they will be fully comparable, So planet-roasters have canceled series of measurements, presumably in order to hamper climate science and thus interfere with reaching conclusions that will show the extent of the coming crisis.
They have even tossed out data from past measurements. Scientists had to rescue the precious records from dumpsters.
If they were saboteurs working for alien enemies, sent to weaken Earth's civilization, their actions would make sense. Why Earthlings would do it is beyond me.
*Spain's culture ministry has returned the first of more than 5,000 items taken by the dictator [Franco] 84 years ago.* That was shortly after the end of the civil war, in which most of the army joined the fascist rebellion, and the Spanish Republic was defended by the volunteers it could raise.
My friends in Spain told me, earlier in this century, that the right-wing party was still permeated by he influence of people who supported Franco's dictatorship, who blocked efforts to end the state's support for Franco. In the past decade, those efforts are going faster.
The US, EU and Turkey endorsed a statement calling for *A Syrian-led transition to "produce an inclusive, non-sectarian and representative government formed through a transparent process", with respect for human rights.*
That doesn't mean it will be easy, or successful, but at east they endorse a good goal.
Many people are opening their hearts and their secrets to bullshit generators. (And to the companies that run them, of course.)
Some major practical threats that the wrecker's fascist machine could wreak.
The page does not include some most profound threats which are longer term:
Coca-Cola made a highly publicized pledge to move to 25% reusable packaging by 2030. But now it seems to have quietly stopped talking about all that.
Society depends on agencies that appoint experts to make carefully studied decisions. Right-wing extremists are working on destroying the ability to do this.
I will not claim that these agencies are always right. Business lobbies often persuade them to go against the interests of society and non-wealthy people. But the right-wing extremists are not trying to restrain that power — on the contrary, they seek to open the floodgates.
New Zealand's right-wing government hollowed out environmental protections by allowing some of them to be "fast-tracked" — that is, evaluated without taking due care.
There may be occasions when this is necessary, but mere profit can never be enough to justify it. Only something desperately needed can justify this.
A study by the US department of Energy reports that, as we would expect, authorizing extracting (and exporting) a lot more natural gas would speed up global heating.
This would increase the risk of deadly damage from "natural" disasters, such as hurricanes, flooding, fires, heat waves, and crop failures, as well as collapse of technological civilization, and these could lead to the death of tens or millions of people in the US. In the shorter term, more natural gas exports could cause difficulties in Americans' lives by making fossil gas more expensive.
This has been criticized as a weak criticism.
*More than three-quarters of UK universities join fossil fuel pledge, say activists.*
Governments must do much more to restrain "investment" in causing global disaster, at whatever levels they can.
In parts of Britain, children of age 10-11 are likely to still believe in Santa Claus. And parents demand that other adults maintain the falsehood.
I'm amused by the irony of a cleric's puncturing one myth while upholding another. But I find it shocking and disturbing that anyone as old as 10 would still believe in Santa Clause.
Parents who hoax that children are liable to try to conscript other people into supporting the lie. This has happened to me, and it puts me in a moral conflict. I don't want to overturn their family arrangements, but joining in the hoax would be doing wrong to the children. I resent the attempt to rope me into doing wrong.
I'm looking for speaking invitations for a trip in January and February that will include some part of Europe, then India, then some other part of Europe.
The first visit to Europe will be roughly Jan 16 to 22. The visit to India will start Jan 22 and can continue into February. The second visit to Europe will be after that. Those dates are flexible.
One advantage of this period for you is that the intercontinental flights are already covered, so you won't need to pay for that.
If you are interested in inviting me, and you have a venue to use and a public to invite, please email me soon with "speaking invitation" in the Subject field, using the name rms and the host gnu dot org.
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".
A song parody, Colors of the Lisp, by Jefferson Carpenter.
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.
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:
Please send comments on these web pages to rms at gnu period org.
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