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"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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I expect to have a trip to Europe in May - June. The start and end dates remain to be decided.
If you would like to invite me to speak during that trip, please write to me now so we can start discussing it. Write to `-invitation' following my three-letter username.
My talks consist of an hour of presentation and an hour of Q&A. The overall focus is software and freedom, but generally the talk includes various subtopics; we can discuss which subtopics together.
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
Richard will give a talk in Ben, Switzerland on June 12 titled Freie/Libre/Libero/Liber Software, for Sovereignty and Freedom.
We suggest you bring cash.
Richard Stallman will speak in Erlangen, Germany on June 16 at 16:00, at the School of Engineering of FAU.
The talk is on the moral issues of free vs nonfree software.
We suggest you bring cash.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to investigate Kash Patel's flagrant misuse of taxpayer funds.
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 Congress to restore funding for Social Security offices.
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 Congress to reject magat recommendations to undermine FEMA.
Global heating is increasing the amount of damage done by disasters, so FEMA needs to be strengthened and better funded. This in addition to strong efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions to make global heating taper off.
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 refuse to fund implementation of the bully's plan that could label millions of Americans as "domestic terrorists".
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 Congress to reject the wrecker's attacks on housing and homeless assistance programs.
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 on major news organizations to cover the wrecker's foreign aid cuts with urgency and moral clarity.
US citizens: support the cops who fought the coup-leader's Jan 6 riot at the Capitol, as they sue him to block his self-settlement meant to give him lots of money to give the rioters as "compensation" for the punishment of their crimes.
US citizens: call on news organizations to cover the persecutor's attacks on the media as threats to press freedom.
US citizens: call on Congress to block the Paramount - Warner Bros merger.
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.
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.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to investigate Kash Patel's flagrant misuse of taxpayer funds.
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 Congress to restore funding for Social Security offices.
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 Congress to reject magat recommendations to undermine FEMA.
Global heating is increasing the amount of damage done by disasters, so FEMA needs to be strengthened and better funded. This in addition to strong efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions to make global heating taper off.
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.
Instagram has eliminated end-to-end encryption, leaving many user communities in danger of persecution.
I suspect that the zucker did this because the persecutor asked him to.
Estimating that around 145,000 young US citizens have had a parent taken away and jailed by the deportation thugs.
A detailed explanation of student loan repayment in the UK shows clearly why it is a far less destructive system than that of the US.
In the UK, even well-paid graduates can't advance very far in paying down their student debt. But does that matter? After 30 years, the debt that remains will be cancelled anyway. To explicitly "rebrand" the UK student debt as a tax on graduates sounds manipulative, but it is valid to argue that the UK's student loan system already is in fact a tax on graduates.
By contrast, in the US system you must pay even if unemployed, and the debt will be canceled only by your death (or perhaps if you are permanently disabled).
The bullshitter alternates between claiming that he is about to launch a massive attack on Iran and claiming that a peace deal is about to be agreed. I don't believe there is any truth in either kind of claim — they are mainly psychological manipulation. I suppose they are aimed at the non-Iranian public, because of Iran's general internet blockage.
One goal of the psychological manipulation is to make the bullshitter impossible to predict. What he says about that is bogus. We need to learn not to start trusting him in any way.
The long, slow fight to give rights to domestic workers has had a victory in Indonesia.
Australia is planning devastating cuts to climate modeling.
Australia's part of global climate modeling is essential because it is the only major contributor that focuses on the southern hemisphere. Since the climate disaster is accelerating, and threatens to kill millions or even billions, the rational thing to do is increase funding for it.
It would be useful to investigate how this decision was made — and how pressure or corruption from planet roasters influenced it.
A rare strain of Ebola virus, for which the usual tests and vaccine do not work, requires global action now.
US government cuts in medical research and aid could kill millions of people.
The latest victims of human colonization include orangutans whose native forest has been systematically colonized with support of the Indonesian government.
For decades, the government has had a policy of settling large numbers of Javanese in islands with less human population density. This has aroused accusations of colonization from the peoples who live in those islands.
A tangled web of secretive campaign organizations is spending billionaires' money to defeat progressive candidates in Democratic primaries.
They have to do it secretively because they are on the edge of campaign finance laws against coordinating PAC-funded activity with candidates' campaigns.
Whether or not it is against the law, it is clearly against democracy. If elections can easily be bought by the rich, they can't be decided by issues.
How the expected increased "productivity" of LLMs for specific tasks can result in decreased productivity, and deskilling, for an organization overall.
The PKK, which fought for independence for the Kurds of southeastern Turkey, has disbanded and peace talks are going on. This provides an opportunity for environmental restoration, if people can grasp it.
For peace to last, Turkey needs to restore democracy enough to permit victory for opponents of Erdoğan, rather than starting a civil war as an excuse to do the election over.
The corrupter dismissed his lawsuit against the US government, and ordered his agent in charge of the Justice Department to make an agreement between him and the US government to set up a slush fund (with government money) which will secretly give some of that money to whoever the corrupter orders. Up to 1.8 billion dollars, total. For instance, it could be used to reward some of the people who at his suggestion attacked the US Capitol on Jan 6, 2021. It could be used for bribes.
In legal terms, that agreement is not a settlement of that lawsuit, but he wants us to think of it as a settlement of that lawsuit, hoping that will give it an odor of legitimacy.
Recruiting ads for the deportation thugs ooze with messages of racist hatred, and an anti-terrorist agency in Colorado warned that they could incite right-wing terrorism.
After nine years, the UK government is finally thinking about prosecuting the many individuals, organizations and companies involved in causing the fatal Grenfell fire.
The Department of Howlingly Serious issued an alert to warn cops all around the US to beware of a spoof site that invited the public to report suspected immigrants — and posts the funny reports.
I'd like to watch a few, but according to the article, they are posted on sites which require nonfree software to access.
Richard will give a talk in Ben, Switzerland on June 12 titled Freie/Libre/Libero/Liber Software, for Sovereignty and Freedom.
US citizens: call on Congress to refuse to fund implementation of the bully's plan that could label millions of Americans as "domestic terrorists".
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.
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:
Please send comments on these web pages to rms at gnu period org.
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