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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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This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman.
The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of
the Free Software Foundation or
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.
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 the Department of Justice to drop all charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver, She was arrested trying to demand answers about a deportation, along with the mayor of Newark, New Jersey.
US citizens: call on several major US stores to state on product labels how much of the price is due to the bully's tariff decrees.
Here's how to make the actionnetwork.org letter campaign linked above work without running the site's nonfree JavaScript code. (See https://gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html.)
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 by visiting that page.) You can finish sending without that code By editing its URL in the browser's address bar, as follows:
First, go to the end and insert `&nowrapper=true'. Then tell the browser to visit that URL. This should give you a version of the page that works without JavaScript. Edit 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 for the result of supporting the campaign without opening your computer to unjust (and potentially malicious) software.
US citizens: phone your senators and urge them to reject injustices in the Republicans' Big Bad Bill
One injustice is making court orders unenforceable — so the bully could brush aside those impediments to absolute power.
Another injustice is the cuts in medicine and food aid for Americans who can't afford it.
And then there are the tax cuts for the rich. (The rest of this email I have copied from a message which suggested running nonfree software. I can't refer the public to that!)
Republicans know these tax cuts are wildly unpopular, so they’re scrambling to rebrand. Speaker Mike Johnson trimmed the plan slightly and Trump floated a tiny rate increase for ultra-high earners both designed to generate positive press.
But don’t be fooled, this is still a massive giveaway to the billionaire class:
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on the Senate to to block weapons sales to Qatar and UAE due to the corrupter's corrupt dealings with both countries.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on Santander Bank to stop investing in deforestation and covering it up with greenwashing.
US citizens: call on Amazon to accept the union's Safety Bill of Rights, and bring its high worker injury rate down to the usual level for warehouses.
US citizens: call on Congress to halt the weapons sales to Israel fueling the massacre in Gaza.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call for stopping the US arrests of public officials for disagreeing with the wrecker.
US citizens: phone your senators and call on the to vote against the magats' Big Bad Bill.
Robert Reich summarizes facts about the Big Bad Bill. Cutting Medicaid and food stamps are just the start of the suffering.
One thing not mentioned there is that the bill would
automatically cause a large cut in Medicaid because
it would increase the federal deficit.
US citizens:
call
on Congress to block Trump's $400 million flying bribe.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens:
call on Congress
to have the FBI investigate real
criminals, especially abusive corporations, not immigrants who have
done no wrong to anyone.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
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.
The US Supreme Court ruled that cities can sue oil companies in state courts for the damages from global heating.
As the article says, these lawsuits' judgments won't be able to repay the cost of the damages done by global heating. All the money in the world won't be able to do that. We have to hope it will lead to a political decision to decarbonize.
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice to drop all charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver, She was arrested trying to demand answers about a deportation, along with the mayor of Newark, New Jersey.
*Classing grievous acts of environmental harm as crimes against peace may hold states and corporations to account.*
As with crimes against humanity, the hard part will be to overcome the ways they use their power to make governments protect them — and protect their crimes too.
I question whether it is wise to include "of a given territory" in the definition of ecocide. The biggest ecocides now in progress cause damage around the world, but that fact should not exclude them from being considered ecocide.
*My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner.*
He published that article over two months ago. It reflects the American ideals of freedom and democracy.
He is still in jail now.
A court in North Dakota ruled that Greenpeace must pay hundreds of millions of dollars in damages for protesting against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
The fossil fuels transported in that pipeline will increase and hasten the damage caused to nearly everyone by global heating disaster. If that leads to the collapse of civilization and the death of most humans, there will be no way to measure the damages Energy Transfer is liable for, nor to collect them from what remains of that company, nor to pay them to the descendants of the dead.
*[DOPE] employees hold stock in firms set to benefit from cuts, Democrats allege.*
When officials know they won't be prosecuted for corruption, they often turn to corruption. The DOPE's slogan could be "Corruption Я Us." I wonder if the corrupter will ask Putin for official Russian permission to use the letter Я.
US citizens: call on several major US stores to state on product labels how much of the price is due to the bully's tariff decrees.
Here's how to make the actionnetwork.org letter campaign linked above work without running the site's nonfree JavaScript code. (See https://gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html.)
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 by visiting that page.) You can finish sending without that code By editing its URL in the browser's address bar, as follows:
First, go to the end and insert `&nowrapper=true'. Then tell the browser to visit that URL. This should give you a version of the page that works without JavaScript. Edit 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 for the result of supporting the campaign without opening your computer to unjust (and potentially malicious) software.
Robert Reich: the corrupter is still a threat, but we can see that the tide is turning against him.
*[The persecutor]’s revenge spree on Harvard echoes well beyond education. Attacks on the university make clear that [his henchmen's] administration will wield its power against anyone who incurs its displeasure
*Palestinians gunned down while trying to reach food aid site in Gaza, hospital says.*
Mahmoud Khalil's lawyers demanded information about the private organizations that said nasty things about him to the US government, reports which the government claims showed some sort of danger, though they may be pure noise.
The wrecker is canceling NASA missions that could elucidate mysteries of the universe, including whether there was life on Mars, and basic mysteries of physics and cosmology.
The magats' cuts in federal agencies that aid survival and reconstruction after emergencies are interfering with recovery from the disastrous Los Angeles fires of January.
PBS canceled a documentary about Art Spiegelman because the people making it refused to omit a scene in which Spiegelman talks about a cartoon that criticizes the would-be king.
Ironically, the executive of PBS had rational grounds to fear that any criticism of him might provoke him to try to destroy PBS. That does not make craven censorship acceptable.
Even more ironically, since he is already trying to destroy PBS, practically speaking PBS had nothing to lose by allowing that scene except its honor.
*Dismay as UK prepares to sign "values-free" £1.6bn trade deal with Gulf states.*
PISSI is citing both the persecutor and Hegseth to recruit supporters.
(PISSI is the Pseudo-Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.)
The persecutor has ordered the deportation thugs to arrest at least 3,000 people per day.
Quotas for arrests are automatically unjust, since they can only be filled if the thugs arrest people who normally should not have been arrested.
On the DEA's program for massive collection of phone call records.
A French hunter shot and killed a bear that was chewing on his leg, and is being prosecuted for killing a protected bear.
It appears that he went to hunt boar in a protected nature reserve. Perhaps he should be tried for that — but that crime cannot deserve death or maiming as a punishment.
Perhaps he should be sentenced to paint clearer markers around the nature reserve, as a form of community service. That will protect the other bears there.
Hungary used facial recognition to punish the participants in protests, for a cause that has been outright forbidden to express.
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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