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"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
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"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
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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 Congress to investigate LICE's arrests of children.
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 Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to allow regulation of spending on political campaigns.
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.
If Democrats (some progressive, but many plutocratist) take control of Congress for 2027 in today's election, that will be a preliminary victory. Magat officials already in place will continue to pervert justice, human rights, and democracy in the US.
If Democrats are to protect the country they will need to fight to do it.
US citizens: call on state attorneys general to investigate Zillow.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Support the lawsuit to keep LICE away from polling places.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to do more than pass the Ban Flock Act. They should pass laws to require all systems that track the public to be designed so that a signed judicial warrant is required to look at the data on any particular person. So I suggest using this action, but rewriting the request to demand more.
Here's how I rewrote the letter text.
Flock surveillance cameras are known for tracking vehicles through their license plates. They also track people by facial recognition. They may do other sorts of general surveillance as well. This surveillance is Orwellian; it creates a danger such as Orwell foresaw.
Regulating only license plate recognition, and only by federal agencies, is only a partial remedy. What we need is to regulate systems that collect data that can be used to track people and find out their activities, so that a specific judicial warrant is required to obtain the data about a person.
Please pass laws to protect Americans from general surveillance, and to require that new digital communication standards be designed to protect us from whoever wants to play Big Brother.
Sincerely,
In How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand, I argue that cameras that can track people should not be connected to any networks. To find out who the camera has recorded should require physically accessing it.
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 sign the bipartisan pledge to uphold midterm election results once certified by states.
The point is, that means resisting magats' preannounced attempts to sabotage the elections that don't go their way.
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 state governors to reject paying state funds to vouchers that support private schools.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call for legislation to prohibit congresscritters and their family members from owning stock in so-called "artificial intelligence" companies.
I reject the marketing term "artificial intelligence" so I refuse to use it.
US citizens: call on the Census Bureau to withdraw the proposed voter-suppressing tax records requirement.
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 congresscritter and senators to investigate the Iran war casualty cover-up.
This is not as big a wrong as launching that war, but it is a good way to attack the magats who did that.
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 states to include data centers in climate defense regulation.
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.
*Melting Ron DeSantis statue unveiled to call out his inaction on climate crisis.*
It's a cute hack.
FBI agents fired by the corrupter for clinging to enforcing laws, rather than political revenge, are organizing to warn the public.
88 very profitable US companies paid no US income tax in 2025. Their combined lobbying and election spending in 2020, 2022 and 2024 added up to 850 million dollars.
That was because of 26 billion dollars in tax breaks, which presumably relate to the lobbying they did.
The No Kings Coalition accused Zuckerberg and Instagram of censoring them by blocking their account during the resent protests.
US deportation prisons deny their prisoners medical treatment and medicines, making them gravely ill. The US then rushes to deport them to garbage dump countries, which will accept any deportees in exchange for money from the US, then does them the worst harm it can come up with.
The US is effectively murdering these deportees, but setting it up so that they are hidden away in the garbage dump when they actually die.
Candidate for Congress Brad Lander joined a group of 80 volunteers who went to the West Bank to help farmers harvest the olives on their olive trees. Israeli soldiers arrested them, saying they had declare that farm a "closed military zone". That seems to be Hebrew for "Justifications are not required here."
El Salvador arrests people to fill a quota for prisoners, and holds them incommunicado for years if judges order them freed.
Naturally, Tyrant Bukele has won the admiration of right-wing extremists around the world.
One risk of geoengineering megaprojects that is often overlooked is that it has to be continuously operated and continually maintained, and its infrastructure is vulnerable to catastrophes such as war.
If it is damaged, the suppressed global heating will come back.
*Over-reliance on chatbots can diminish critical-thinking skills, study finds.*
Many Americans think the US system of sales and support has become a nightmare.
I am in one such nightmare now. I need some felt heel lifts to put in various pairs of shoes because of Achilles tendinitis, and I can't find any place I can get them, except for Amazon which is out of the question. At least I can reach a human for customer service for my prescriptions by walking to the pharmacy.
If you reject, as I do, all devices that demand to communicate with you across the network using a server that isn't yours, you will be safe from the "demand for an app". These "apps" are freedom-trampling, and so are the operating systems they run on, so I reject them all in a blanket fashion.
Global heating is predicted to endanger 96% of shallow-water coral reefs by 2075. This is could cause extinction of 1/4 of the species in the sea and eliminate the food for hundreds of millions of people.
Scientists have been telling us for decades to expect this eventually, but now we are close enough to make a more reliable prediction.
It is not too late to prevent this disaster, but we need to overcome the political power of the fossil fuel companies to do it.
U.S. and Russia worked together to modify a proposed global treaty to govern autonomous weapons, eliminating the requirement that attacks be approved by human overseers.
Such a requirement would not have been a guarantee against atrocities; humans have committed and ordered plenty of those and continue to do so. Russia commits them regularly in Ukraine, while America's ally Israel commits them regularly in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon.
However, there are also soldiers, and armies, that take the rules of war seriously and prosecute soldiers who break them. The erased requirement would have had a real effect, there.
The persecutor and Putin are drifting into an alliance, and I expect they will both use every available weapon to reduce people to helpless obedience.
*US workers facing deadly heat borrow from tomato pickers to win key protections.*
The latest feat of Alleged Intelligence is an internet worm that infects "smart" devices.
"Smart" is marketing speak for products designed to be remote controlled, primarily by the manufacturer but secondarily by the purchaser and the purchaser's friends and associates, all of whom will be snooped on. They are the ideal prey for conversion into a botnet. Then someone other than the manufacturer can exercise the power over those people that the manufacturer was supposed to exercise.
I refuse to have any such devices in my apartment, because I consider snooping by their manufacturer just as bad as snooping by anyone else.
Arthur Lundeen was tied to a seat on an flight, reportedly simply for his nasty words. But here is a report that he did more than insult people; he also hit them. That would have justified tying him up.
Here is the previous report.
A Christian nationalist provocateur tried to trap Michigan Senate candidate Abdulrahman El-Sayed by challenging him to "disavow" the Muslim Brotherhood, which is unfair in the same way as asking a man to "disavow" beating his wife.
El-Sayed responded by rejecting the Muslim Brotherhood, then championing the US Constitution and freedom of religion, and challenging the provocateur to do likewise. And praising President Kennedy's example of doing that.
Bravo!
The London thug department is setting up face recognition cameras on lamp-posts. It says the cameras will compare people's faces with a list of people wanted for arrest, and keep no records of anyone else.
Supposing it carries out that stated intention, should it be reassuring? Not entirely, because the UK has already criminalized political positions, such as stating support for Palestine Action. In other words, the line between stating a political stance and being a "wanted suspect" to be caught by face recognition in the street has been smudged in advance.
It was years ago that UK thugs began using license plate tracking to find protesters driving to a protest, and stop them from reaching it.
[pol note about protesters stopped while driving to a protest and held for hours so they could not go. ISTR the horrible act they planned was a banner drop. It pointed to a Guardian article. I think this note was more than 13 years ago]
The Department of Harshness and Surveillance is spending half a billion dollars this year on surveillance, including surveillance technology (both buying things and developing things).
Repression of political opposition is explicitly one of the goals.
A thug has been arrested and charged for using Flock cameras to track his wife and her "previous acquaintance". It was clear he did this dishonestly, but his lawyer says that is not a crime.
Surveillance cameras such as Flock (and other companies) make are dangerous to society. They can be misused by individuals, such as that thug, but the worst danger is misuse by government agencies for repression.
I agree that we should make it a crime for individuals to make unauthorized use of these systems to track or menace individuals. But above all we need to make it hard for government agencies to authorize use of these systems without proper grounds. Any use of them should require a warrant signed by a judge.
Even that is too easy. Access to these cameras needs to be somewhat inconvenient, or else they will be used too often. That is why I suggest that they must not have remote digital access. It should be necessary to visit each camera, having received a warrant to do so, to see whether certain specified suspects have been seen by it in a certain period of time.
Months of heavy rains in the generally arid four corners area of the US Southwest have led to flooding, with some people taking refuge on the tops of their houses.
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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