The photo comes from wikimedia.org
"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
The photo comes from
wikimedia.org
"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
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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 DHS to restore refugees' opportunity to defend themselves.
Here's the message I sent.
Stop creating opportunities to rush to ruin refugees' lives.
In common decency, the DHS must withdraw this interim final rule and restore the 30-day period for refugees to respond to a Notice of Intent to Terminate (NOIT) under 8 CFR 207.9. And give them all the reasonable chance to make their cases.
Your new rule is a blatant attempt to rig the process, to make it unfair. Any fair-minded person, anyone who values justice, can see that at a glance. This will bring dishonor on my country -- so, in the name of decency and patriotism, I call on you to cease and desist.
Sincerely,
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 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.
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.
A group of UK parliamentarians acknowledge that the Sizewell C nuclear power plant would be a terrible deal for the taxpayers.
Nuclear power tends to be a bad deal, because it is more expensive and takes far longer than renewable generation.
That being so, it provokes suspicion that the government has some hidden reasons for pushing the nuclear plan.
*"No human at the helm": Delaware plan would let AI agents run entire businesses.*
If the agents direct the business to commit crimes, no one could be punished. Could the shareholders profit from that outcome? It is crucial to ensure that no one who has control can gain from that.
What has made French student protests so powerful?
The muskrat's new datacenter, built in a city in Mississippi, has turbine generators that sound as loud as jet engines. One neighbor is suing and asking others to join.
The muskrat has offered to buy the houses in the area for market value, but that is unfair given the trouble that moving would involve. To be a decent man, he should offer twice the market value for each house — he can afford it.
Warning that the current Ebola outbreak, the broadest ever, could spread to countries outside Africa.
Rich countries that have not given money to get the outbreak under control for Africans' sake must now help fund getting the outbreak under control so as to protect their own populations.
Some economics departments continue to teach the system of discounting future profits and future disasters, which leads to systematically understating the impact of climate disaster when it happens.
How [the wrecker] Destroyed South Africa’s Effort to Slow HIV Transmission.
Modern drugs can stop the transmission of HIV, turning it into a harmless, slowly disappearing relic — as long as people can still get their drugs.
We should teach everyone how artificial charisma works, so they can learn to resist it.
George Mason tried to warn Americans in 1787 that giving presidents unlimited power to pardon was an invitation to corruption.
The general respect for rule of law made it unacceptable for presidents to abuse this before, but the corrupter has made it acceptable to those inclined towards corruption.
US cops are using machine learning systems to identify "suspicious" routes of travel, then inventing false pretexts to stop and search drivers who have been observed following such a route.
This practice involves a lie every time, but thugs don't mind lying to get what they want. (Perhaps that is why they support the bullshitter.)
The UK government has blocked activist Andreas Malm, a Swede, from visiting the UK to speak on a panel about Palestine.
It presented uselessly vague reason for doing so.
Macron plans to penalize protesters for damage to property which occurs near their protests — a policy demanded by the right-wing extremist party.
Experts are starting to question the validity of the concept of a single very broad "autistic spectrum".
I never adopted that concept: I distinguish between Asperger's and autism. I am not wedded to that terminology, though.
A local truce between Ukraine and the Putin forces permitted people who had left Oleshky to go to Ukraine.
The Environmental Defense Fund reports that the saboteur in chief *boosted half of US coal plants with taxpayer dollars and "free passes to pollute".*
The difference between progressive Democrats and plutocratist Democrats is visible in the stance of California Democratic politicians regarding the ballot initiative to tax billionaires' wealth.
Someone should post, in a special web page, the position on that initiative of each Democratic politician in or of California. Then in future years voters will be able reject them in Democratic primaries.
(satire) *Supreme Court Upholds Temporal Gerrymander That Would Cost Democrats 1932 Election.*
Deportation thugs are using their cars as weapons to injure or kill people that they have suspicions about. Afterward, they often lie to put the blame on the victim.
Greenpeace protected a substantial part of the North Sea from bottom trawling by dropping boulders there.
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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