I support this specific campaign, because it is a campaign for honesty and against worthless Pretend Intelligence. It may help people reject PI slop.

However, I continue to reject the selfishness of most of the same authors, when they demand the power to stop human readers from honestly and truthfully sharing copies of human-authored books with other humans.

[Nonetheless,] Charlotte Nichols opposes plan to cut jury trials in England and Wales and calls [instead] for creation of special courts to hear rape cases.*

I basically agree with her: prosecuting crime is vital and so is the right to a trial by jury. There is no fundamental conflict between them — all that's needed is to tax the rich enough to pay for these and the other things that even non-rich people deserve.

Alas, COP30 proceeded to (in effect) abandon that goal, which many countries had abandoned already in the preceding year.

The causes of that abandonment are not visible, but I suspect the impetus comes from billionaires who are sucking up to governments that are more or less fascist and in cahoots with the fossil fuel companies.

One of them is Bill Gates, who has called for offering palliative care to the billions of poor who will be wiped over coming decades by accelerating global heating.

By the way, I do not endorse the straw man claim that global heating could literally render humanity extinct. Humans, even without science and the technology it led to, were very flexible about surviving in a wide range of environments. But the number who could survive would be far less than today.

]]> Sat, 14 Mar 2026 20:37:49 -0000 Richard Stallman https://stallman.org/archives/2026-jan-apr.html#13_March_2026_(Iran_as_a_threat,_UK) https://stallman.org/archives/2026-jan-apr.html#13_March_2026_(Iran_as_a_threat,_UK) Britain's right-wing extremist politician, Farage, bizarrely says that Iran is a bigger threat to the UK than Putin.

This seems bizarre and irrational, but it is understandable seeing that that's what the corrupter thinks of the question. Farage is simply acting as a repeater for him.

]]> Sat, 14 Mar 2026 02:37:37 -0000 Richard Stallman https://stallman.org/archives/2026-jan-apr.html#13_March_2026_(Media_for_the_Iran_war,_UK) https://stallman.org/archives/2026-jan-apr.html#13_March_2026_(Media_for_the_Iran_war,_UK) The influential spokespeople of the British political class are pushing for joining the wrecker's war with Iran, giving absurd reasons that the people are solidly rejecting.

Why, I ask, are people with those views the ones highlighted in the media?

The British major media are mostly right-wing, often viciously so. I conjecture that the media's owners, and those of big advertisers, want to keep business in charge, and they have decided that if Britain swears fealty to the wrecker, he will reward those owners. What happens to the rest of Britain counts for little with them.

]]> Sat, 14 Mar 2026 02:37:37 -0000 Richard Stallman https://stallman.org/archives/2026-jan-apr.html#13_March_2026_(Iran_bombs'_environmental_impact) https://stallman.org/archives/2026-jan-apr.html#13_March_2026_(Iran_bombs'_environmental_impact) *Bombing of Iran's oil infrastructure to have major environmental fallout, experts warn.*

]]> Sat, 14 Mar 2026 02:37:37 -0000 Richard Stallman https://stallman.org/archives/2026-jan-apr.html#13_March_2026_(Nukeless_in_Iran) https://stallman.org/archives/2026-jan-apr.html#13_March_2026_(Nukeless_in_Iran) *[The bully's Iran war will reinforce North Korea's view that nuclear weapons are the only path to security.* ]]> Sat, 14 Mar 2026 02:37:36 -0000 Richard Stallman https://stallman.org/archives/2026-jan-apr.html#13_March_2026_(Urgent:_Section_702_of_PAT_RIOT_act) https://stallman.org/archives/2026-jan-apr.html#13_March_2026_(Urgent:_Section_702_of_PAT_RIOT_act) How section 702 of the PAT RIOT act allows the US government to collect and search Americans' communications without warrants.

Section 702 will expire soon unless renewed.

Please phone your senators to call on let this section expire, by refusing to extend it.

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.

She had opposed calls for the festival itself to take a specific stand, instead saying that artists presenting films there should be free to express their views. Apparently such freedom is now considered "antisemitic".

This can only be called a surrender to planet roasters. The US and UK are doing similar things. The inevitable result is disaster.

Islam has had a thread of such fanaticism for a thousand years, at least. Muslim fanatics, the Almohads, took over Morocco in the 12th century, then parts of Spain. The Wikipedia entry does not mention this, but they banned music too.

If you want to listen to the example linked in the article, please don't simply follow the link to Youtube! Use invidio.us or yt-dlp, preferably through a proxy so that it can't be tracked to you.

Later in the article, there is a link for a different kind of music. I warn you, it is on Spotify.

Out, out, damned Spotify!

Was this an instance of the crime of impersonating an officer? Can they be prosecuted and imprisoned for this?

I watched a Shen Yun performance once in Paris with a French friend. The impression it produced on me was curious: it reproached the Chinese government as cruelly repressive (which indeed it is), and spread on such a thick layer of this teaching that I began to find it annoying, despite the fact that I agreed in advance with that reproach.

I told this to my friend, and she had felt the same. "It preaches too much," she said.

I still condemn China's repression and threats — like what the bully is trying to impose in the US — but I have no appetite to see another Shen Yun performance.

She had to repeat that she did not know Epstein, and was asked repeatedly about UFOs and about Pizzagate.

Republicans imposed a rule against releasing photos, then Rep. Boebert (Republican) secretly took a photo and released it, violating that rule.

Montana is planning to do this, and soon maybe California too.

This is a nice form of historical preservation, but it can't get more than a tiny fraction of the water that's needed for India's rapidly growing population. India (and the world as a whole) need to stop population growth.

That is one item in a long catalog of unjustified cruel bigotry that is fueled by various religions.

I can only envision one motive for this: the saboteur in chief is determined to maximize fossil fuel consumption.

Would it be possible for countries to impose a tax on importation of goods based on the computed fuel use for transporting those goods from the place where they were produced? From the ship's actual consumption one can calculate the fuel use per gram of cargo along that trajectory, and make the tax proportional to that. The fuel needed to move the ship over that trajectory without cargo could be "charged" to the actual cargo through some formula.

Nothing will stop them from using it to identify protesters and then place grave charges against their protests. The efficiency of the system will help them repress many more protesters than before.

Such arbitrary and abrupt invalidation of anyone's credentials is cruel and unjust regardless of the criteria for which licenses to invalidate, but cruel injustice is precisely right-wing extremists' goal: it is performative cruelty, naturally aimed at one of their usual hate targets.

Some of the people targeted are suing.

It could just be a series of human incompetence events. But it could also be worse than that. I wonder if they are basing their targeting on pretend intelligence generated by a Pretend Intelligence system. Israel used to do that when bombing Gaza. They seemed to consider that method a success, but perhaps that is they preferred to kill any Palestinians in Gaza rather than none.

Starmer Labour has completed the discarding of them, and put the rich firmly in the driver's seat, after expelling or driving away many of its elected officials who still believed in those ideals.

These ideals fit well with a Green Party, since the rule of the billionaires, which Starmer Labour supports, and the global environmental disaster they have decided to impose, is likely to kill of most of the world's population and reduce to serfs most of the survivors.

A Green Party would naturally oppose both aspects of that.

People had been targeted with smears, disinformation, harassment, doxing, visa cancellations, financial blacklisting, loss of employment and arrest.*

]]> Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:45:19 -0000 Richard Stallman https://stallman.org/archives/2026-jan-apr.html#12_March_2026_(Urgent:_Investigate_facial_recognition) https://stallman.org/archives/2026-jan-apr.html#12_March_2026_(Urgent:_Investigate_facial_recognition) US citizens: call on Congress to investigate the deportation thugs' mass surveillance and use of widespread face recognition.

]]> Fri, 13 Mar 2026 02:37:36 -0000 Richard Stallman https://stallman.org/archives/2026-jan-apr.html#12_March_2026_(Iran_VS_Israel_plus_USA) https://stallman.org/archives/2026-jan-apr.html#12_March_2026_(Iran_VS_Israel_plus_USA) Iran's government has a planned long-term strategy for winning the war. US officials didn't bother to think about one, assuming that resistance was impossible.

Since the Iranian regime and the US regime are both cruel and repressive, it would be unjust for either of them to control Iran. But there is no evident way for Iran to avoid both of those outcomes.

*Democrats must defund [the fascist's] Imperial war.* ]]> Fri, 13 Mar 2026 02:37:36 -0000 Richard Stallman https://stallman.org/archives/2026-jan-apr.html#11_March_2026_(Cutting_down_endangered_native_forest_in_Australia) https://stallman.org/archives/2026-jan-apr.html#11_March_2026_(Cutting_down_endangered_native_forest_in_Australia) A US mining company has been cutting down endangered native forest in Australia. The Australian government secretly made a deal to allow it to continue this, to placate the wrecker.

This policy is necessary because masons in a police department will come across the requirement to support each other against the perpetrators and/or victims of crimes or bad policies.

Because Nazi symbols stand for hate, it is now perhaps prohibited to condemn acts and policies embodying hatred by comparing them to Nazis. This would be good for a laugh at the cops' expense, if it weren't seriously dangerous.

Over the last 45 years, the frequency of such days has increased from around 20 days per year to around 60 days per year. About 60% of that (36 days per year) are caused by fossil fuel, but some of the rest is caused by other human activities such as deforestation.

As long as we keep driving global heating, we will increase our vulnerability to fire. This is why I reject the idea that today's fires, floods and storms are "natural disasters".

A secondary problem of this increased temperature level is damage to coffee cultivation, in the main coffee-producing countries.

Those companies are North America, so in practice they can ignore the EU's "data protection" regulations, and the US government can seize any and all of that data.

This example shows the concrete meaning of dis-services operating in cloudy servers. Don't trust them! I never do.

Of course, I would never ask to be identified on LinkedIn. I do not use LinkedIn at all, because it too is cloudy processing, not to mention the other unjust things it does to its users. But LinkedIn is just one example, and the broad conclusion applies to nearly any business that wants personal data from you.

It is legitimate to monitor the conduct of police officers in ways that would not be morally legitimate for workers in general, because police officers have special authority and face the temptation to become thugs. However, giving their personal data to Palantir is not excusable.

Sad to say, use of "bossware" for monitoring of workers with no special authority has become widespread.

Starmer Labour's ministers say Britain needs "investment stability", but that is a bad outcome when it comes to investment that is a kind of exploitation. That ought to be criminal, not protected.

The UK, like most countries, is unstable against being consumed from the inside out by business. The way to put an end to this instability is to make the owners of water company stock forfeit the entire value of their "investments".

As a result, when American children start developing polio thanks to the lunacy of RFK Jr (and his boss, the wrecker), they won't even get the treatment that sick children in the 1950s used to get.

This leads me to suspect that he is planning a military-style attack against Durov or the people who operate the servers behind Telegram. against Durov or the people who operate the servers behind Telegram.