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
His briefing told him that the plans were not then ready to be carried out. But they were carried out that very day. It seems that the right-wing enemies of President Allende accepted the cooperation and help of the US, but made their own decisions about how to overthrow Chile's government.
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This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman.
The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of
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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.
I urge you to vote in Democratic primaries for the progressive candidate, if there is one. And in the final election I urge you to vote for Democrats, unless a liberal independent had a good chance of winning.
The largest part of the site is the political notes, and they are typically updated every day.
I'm looking for people to![[America Means Civil Liberties / Patriotism Means Protecting
Them / www.aclu.org/safefree ]](flag_set_vectorized.png)
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the ETHICS act so that they can't profit by buying and selling stocks that their votes will affect
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on the Senate to keep MAGA bigotry out of the National Defense Authorization Act.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on T-Mobile, GM, CVS, and Elevance to stop funding Republican harassment using fake criminal accusations to attack voting rights.
US citizens: Show your support to Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter for fighting and blocking monopolies.
Imagine if we had a president and congress that supported all of FDR's New Deal, not just a few parts.
US citizens: call on University administrators and boards to end repressive tactics against protests in support of Palestinians' rights.
I agree with the recommendation that we should not label ourselves or others as "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestine". We should campaign for peace between those two nations and the safety of all.
Everyone: call on news networks to expose Project 2025's nightmare tax scheme.
Tell Kroger's to stop trying to identify all its customers through facial recognition.
I edited my letter to say that trying to identify each customers is unjust even aside from the use of that information for precision gouging.
Here's how to make the actionnetwork.org letter campaign linked above function without running the site's nonfree JavaScript code. I presume you have deactivated JavaScript or are using the LibreJS plugin.
I have done the first 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 some of them.
To start, in the personal information 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 should enable LibreJS or disable JavaScript.) You can finish sending without that code By editing its URL in the browser's address bar, as follows:
First, go to the end. Then 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.
Everyone: call on ABC to expose the right-wing extremist's connection to Project 2025 in the coming presidential debate.
Here's how to make the actionnetwork.org letter campaign linked above function without running the site's nonfree JavaScript code.
First, make sure you have deactivated JavaScript's or are using the LibreJS plug-in.
I have done the first 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 some of them.
To start, in the personal information 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.) 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. Enter 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 compared with the benefit of supporting the campaign without opening your computer to unjust (and potentially malicious) software.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators to support the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax.
You can be sure that billionaires are phoning those same elected officials on the other side.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
Many US billionaires are donating millions to elect the insurrectionist because he has promised to help them take even more of America's wealth from the rest of us.
If you know of an institution (or part of one) named after any of the billionaires mentioned in the video, for instance Steve Schwarzman, how about holding protests against his association with a convicted corrupt official that tried to steal a US election and openly threatens to try again.
Simply pasting "Trump" or "Trumptool" over the name of his billionaire supporter might be a good start — but do expect to have to put that sign up again frequently.
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.
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.
It is exciting that SB 976 turns towards restricting recommendation algorithms. But these options should not be limited to minors — every user should have this choice. (Please do not refer to teenagers as "children"; that feeds the US tendency to treat them like children and retard their development.)
However, I suggest taking a step beyond just choosing to use or not use the platform's addiction system. Recommendation algorithms should be completely separated from platforms!
If you want to use a nontrivial recommendation algorithm, you should be able to choose it yourself and use it anonymously. You could send it the URLs you want it to base its choices on. These might be some of the pages you had visited, and perhaps pages you had not visited.
Then it should send you its recommendations. You could pass all, or just some, or none of those recommendations to the platform to look at them.
AB 1949 is admirable because it gives a small boost to privacy for users of all ages, not only for children. It isn't enough, though — users should also be guaranteed the right and possibility to access through the Tor network and to use aliases. And collection of a user's data by the state should require a warrant against the user.
The door plug that blew out of a Boeing 737 Max 9 airplane was missing four bolts meant to hold it in place. They were missing because Boeing maintenance removed them and did not put them back in again.
Some workers actually made the mistake, but they were working as part of a work system that Boeing management was responsible for setting up and running. That's where the real fault is.
I suggest passing a law to require aircraft manufacturing and repair companies to have a certain fraction of licensed commercial pilots on their boards. Perhaps 66%.
Private equity is gobbling up large parts of the US nursing home business. This puts patients in danger since private equity can amass lots of money, create an oligopoly, and get away with abuses.
The study suggests that "regulation may be needed." I will take a stronger stand and call for firm limits — perhaps even prohibiting private equity combinations from owning home nursing businesses.
I'v also proposed prohibiting private equity from buying up lots of rental housing.
Here are some quotations that I particularly like.
You can now read the political notes on Mastodon.
MIT canceled its contract for reading Elsevier journals several years ago and has suffered no great inconvenience as a result. This is great news, because it suggests that more universities can cancel their contracts too.
MIT saved a substantial amount of money by doing this, but that is a secondary issue. What's important is that if more universities cancel these contracts, the result could be to wipe out the journal publishers or make them desperate enough to agree to be bought out for an affordable sum. After buying them out, the new copyright holder could make all the online copies libre.
Please join me in shunning the term "open access" and using the term "free scientific publishing" instead. The article linked just above explains why that term is better.
Analyzing this situation as an instance of a "collective action problem."
I think that one of government's missions is to fix these problems for the people. To do that, we need to elect representatives and officials who won't hesitate to say that some profitable business is a parasite and advocate laws to nullify its business model.
Digital game publishers are trying to twist copyright law to construe ad-blocking as copyright infringement. That would magically make them illegal without consulting the people's thoughts on the matter.
The article linked to above makes the deep mistake of using the term "IP" to refer both to copyright and to other disparate laws. That usage might leads you to suppose you could generalize about those laws and reach one single conclusion that would apply to all of them.
That is a path to confusion, because these laws are dissimilar in almost every point. If you want to think clearly, treat copyright as one issue, patents as another unrelated issue, trade secrets as another issue unrelated to those, trademarks as yet another issue unrelated to the other three, and likewise for plant variety monopolies, IC mask monopolies, design patents and publicity rights.
If you assume that any one of them is similar to any other, you're headed for error. Instead, do as I do: I think about just one law, I call it by its distinguishing name, and I never imagine that what I learn or conclude about it applies to any other law.
The planet roasters of the North Sea have warned that the proposed increase in the windfall profits tax levied on them would result in decreased amounts of drilling, and decreased extraction rate, over the coming decade.
The author of that article seems not to understand that that is part of the overall goal, which is to move from civilization-endangering fossil fuels to renewable generation.
All the arguments that planet roasters make for letting them extract more and more are based on burying this point. One of the things that disappoints me about The Guardian is that it continues to publish articles with this slant.
The French president, Macron, who is on the plutocratist right-wing, appointed a plutocratist right-wing prime minister, Bernier. There have been massive protests.
Bernier and Starmer seem to get along very well.
Arwa Mahdawi argues that it is now demonstrated that no amount or gravity of Israeli atrocities against Palestinians will make Biden act to restrain those atrocities. Sad to say, it looks like that is true.
However, I can't understand the fuss about Israeli soldiers who put on the underwear of Gazan women. They meant that as mockery, which is not nice, but mockery is as nothing compared to the atrocities committed against those same women (and almost all of Gaza). Those women (and their families) have been driven from their homes. Some have been killed, and more are being killed. Those soldiers have probably participated in the real atrocities.
A person who would get more outraged about making fun of women's underwear than about these violent atrocities would seem to lack a sense of proportion.
South Australia is considering a bill to require social media platforms to check the ages of users, which would have the effect of requiring them to demand that each user identify perself.
US citizens: call on Congress to pass the ETHICS act so that they can't profit by buying and selling stocks that their votes will affect
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
The charges against Pavel Durov are about chat groups, not encrypted conversations. It is a relief that this is not an effort to ban end-to-end encryption. However, I am somewhat concerned about the announced changes. Those who will be affected by them will include political dissidents as well as criminals. The phrase "upload media" is very vague, but if it means "upload videos", I fear that blocking this will do more to hamper the fight against crime (and particularly crime by agents of the state) than to hamper crime.
Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, an American, went to Nablus to join nonviolent protests against an fairly new Israeli colony (nominally unauthorized) near the town of Beita. Israelis fired guns to crush the protest and she was killed.
Some witnesses say a sniper shot her in the head. If so, that was murder.
Many Americans have gone to Israel and Palestine to protest against the apartheid system and its cruel expressions, and some have been killed doing so. One I recall was Rachel Corrie, killed in 2003 as she refused to leave a Palestinian house that the Israeli army intended to demolish.
The inquiry into the London tall building fire found that the system of construction regulations had been thoroughly corrupted. Companies sold flammable building materials, contemptuously violating safety standards and ignoring objections, and regulatory bodies had been nullified by a government whose priority was "efficiency" through "cutting red tape".
What it shows is that the red tape is necessary because the regulations are necessary. (Similar lessons taught the need for these regulations in the first place.)
The corporations add employees culpable should be prosecuted, but only the people can democratically reject the politicians that propose to "cut red tape" that is necessary for public safety.
*Greens to push Labour for wealth tax to fund [Britain's] public services.*
Some Republicans are giving lip service to supporting the interests of workers. Alas, it can't be more than lip service as long as they are dependent on support from barons of business.
Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All, by Mark Green and Ralph Nader, show the bullshitter's delusions and how they add up to denial of reality.
For example:
Harris downplays identity politics — instead of asking us to vote for the "first female president", she calls for defending women's rights.
In other words, she is concerned with the substance of feminism, not the identity aspect. That is admirable.
I don't directly care whether the US president is male, female, both, or neither. Those things are per personal matter, and don't affect the public. I care whether the US president stands for justice, rights of real persons (not fictitious ones), and helping the disadvantaged (which in many societies tends to include women).
HR McMaster, the corrupter's national security adviser for over a year, says he thinks Putin developed a hold over the corrupter by flattering him.
Unlike McMaster, I know about these matters only what I read in the news. But I got the feeling before and during the corrupter's term as president that he was making decisions to help Putin.
On the day that that article was published, I ran into Phil Zimmerman (author of PGP) and in conversation with him referred to the corrupter as "the Manchurian candidate". Zimmermann said he believed the corrupter was indeed the Manchurian candidate, in league with Putin.
*The Biden administration has accused Russia of carrying out a sustained disinformation campaign targeted at American voters and meant to influence the outcome of November’s presidential elections.*
This includes paying Americans to spread Putin's message. Others then repeat the disinformation without knowing Putin's role in convincing them to do so.
Two North Korean athletes face punishment for allowing themselves to be photographed at the Olympic Games together with South Korean athletes, after both pairs had received medals.
If the North Korean pair do not show sufficient contrition, they may be chosen as targets for the next Two Minute Hate.
Major advances in battery technology promise to eliminate any practical limit on how much electrical energy the world can store. With enough renewable generation capacity, and these new kinds of batteries, we will not need any fossil fuel or nuclear power for activities that can run on electricity.
That by itself can't enable eliminating all greenhouse gas emissions, but it can eliminate most of them.
Explaining why nuclear power plants are not the solution.
*Europe’s food and farming lobbies have recognized the need to eat less meat after hammering out a shared vision for the future of agriculture with green groups and other stakeholders.*
I expect they are proposing less change than is really needed, but if they mean this sincerely, it will be a step forward towards survival.
*Israel lays siege to Jenin as it stops food and water, blocks ambulances.*
These are massacre tactics. Israel is extending its system of atrocities in Gaza to the West Bank.
Phoenix has suffered 100 consecutive days of temperatures above 100°F.
That's not as bad as it will be in coming decades.
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".
A song parody, Colors of the Lisp, by Jefferson Carpenter.
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.
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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