Richard Stallman's Personal Page

RSS site feed for the most recent political notes and new material.

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.

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The largest part of the site is the political notes, and they are typically updated every day.

[America Means Civil Liberties / Patriotism Means Protecting
Them / www.aclu.org/safefree ]

graphic by Susan Henson
Americans, you may wish to copy this icon to your own page, as a way of showing what patriotism means to you.

Urgent action items

US citizens: phone the FCC to oppose the merger of Charter and Time Warner Cable.
Everyone: Call on Nike to stop renting a big store in Trump Tower.
US citizens: stop Arch Coal from building roads in the Sunset Roadless Area.
US citizens: call on Obama to end fracking on public lands.
US citizens: tell Clinton, release your speech texts.
US citizens: call on Congress to hold gun manufacturers responsible when their negligence gets someone shot.

Simply making a gun does not constitute negligence, and the gun manufacturer should not automatically be liable when someone is shot, just as a car manufacturer should not automatically be liable when someone is hit with a car. However, the gun manufacturer should not get an automatic free pass which the car manufacturer doesn't get.
US citizens: call on the Democratic National Committee to impose sanctions on Democrats that support the TPP in a lame-duck session of Congress.
Massachusetts citizens: call on House Speaker DeLeo to raise the "net metering" limit, which limits selling solar-generated electricity to the grid.
US citizens: call on the government to forbid using fracking wastewater to grow organic food.
If you have Javascript disabled, this page may appear not to work, but in fact it does work.
Everyone: call on President Zuma not to legalize trade in rhino horn in South Africa.
Everyone: Tell world leaders, 15000 nuclear weapons add up to no nuclear security.
US citizens: call on Congress to fight the practice of wage theft.
US citizens: call on Obama to protect the Grand Canyon watershed.
US citizens: call on Obama's task force to advocate full tracing of seafood for commercial sale.
US citizens: call on Congress to preserve food stamp support for people that are looking for jobs or training, even when they can't find those.

Recording of Guantanamero

Listen to the recording of Guantanamero, a protest song written in Spanish. The recording is in Ogg Vorbis format. To install an Ogg Vorbis player, see the FSF's Ogg Players page.

There Ought to Be a Law

Fine government contractors for hiring ex-officials.
Businesses should be heavily fined if they use subcontracted workers to do any given kind of work for more than 120 hours in each of 4 successive months. If a business steadily needs that much work of a given kind, it should hire regular staff to do the work and give them regular benefits.
No sports team can receive a subsidy from any US jurisdiction, and that include's the team's stadium or other facilities.
Fixing too big to fail.
Companies that are among the ten largest in any market should not be allowed to merge — period.
Any company that wants to use genetically modified organisms other than in research should be required to get a license from the state. One condition of the license should be a requirement to answer (for publication) any and all questions posed by regulators about the organisms, their planned use, and the experiments done on them. Thus, any aim of the company to keep secrets about them will be categorically rejected in advance.
If a company has changed its name within the past 5 years, or if a substantial part of it was acquired from another company, it should be legally required to include a statement with the old name in all its publications, announcements, and paid publicity. This would foil companies like Blackwater and Philip Morris that change their names to escape the odium of their past deeds.

Quotes

Here are some quotations that I particularly like.

[More Cartoons]

Copy this button (courtesy of R.Siddharth) to express your rejection of Facebook.

Support the Green Party

Republican Election Rigging Tactics

Don't do business with Apple

Don't do business with Amazon

Don't use Skype

Evoting

The Olympics

E-books

Non-oppressive Commercial E-books

Don't use Facebook

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.

Boycott Harry Potter Books, Movies, etc.

Internet Music EULAS

Business Supremacy Treaties

No national identity cards

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, Ireland, New Zealand, UK, the Philippines. Australia's previous government tried to institute national ID cards, but the Labor government dropped the plan.

India is now trying to institute national ID cards. Support the campaign against them.

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.

Wikipedia has a list of identity card policies by country.

Borders

Stay away from certain countries because of their bad immigration policies.

Flight connections

Avoid flight connections in these airports because of their treatment of passengers.

The Lifelong Activist

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.

Mimi and Eunice

The Mimi and Eunice book by Nina Paley is great.

Solidarity Economy and Free Software

Personal Declaration of Richard Stallman and Euclides Mance on Solidarity Economy and Free Software.

Long-term action items

Political Articles

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 order copies of my book, 'Free Software, Free Society, 2nd edition', signed or not signed.

Adapting the Marseillaise to the greatest threat to civilization.
Proposing the Logo Sea Turtle — for Whales (October 2015)
Controlling When the Cameras Record (August 2015)
A few words to Greece (June 2015)
Fixing Too Big To Fail (Apr 2015)
Enslaved Workers
What I said about Hrant Dink in my talks in Turkey (Apr 2015)
Earth under attack from planet Koch.
Fine government contractors for hiring ex-officials (Feb 2015)
Suggestion to the target of a witch hunt (Feb 2015)
Nonexistence (Feb 2015)
The Thermocene Epoch (Feb 2015)
Digital Voting. (Jan 2015)
My letter asking the judge not to sentence Jeremy Hammond to prison. (Jan 2015)
Internet Voting (May 2014)
The patent system is, at best, not worth keeping. (February 2014)
Why We Need A State (November 2013)
We can put an end to "too big to fail" with an innovative tax that also defeats corporate tax-dodging. (August 2013)
Exxon and the Letter Exx. (April 1, 2013)
Fixing too big to fail (February 2013)
Why internet music "sale" is a bad deal. (January 2013)
On-line education is using a flawed Creative Commons license (September 2012) French Translation
Redistributable Scientific Publishing (April 2012)
My Doctor's Office Asked me to Lie (August 2011)
Responding to Beggars
UK extreme pornography law.
The Zeitgeist Movement
The states need to form a union.
Additional Political Articles are on a seperate page

Political notes

"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.

Political notes about the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy are being archived on their own page

Media/Press/Bios

Richard Stallman's bio and publicity photos, and other things of interest to the press, have been moved to a separate page.

Travel experiences

How it happened that I planned speeches at Israeli universities, then cancelled them.
Richard Stallman's travel blog
My visit to Machu Picchu
Stories about visits to Tikal and Greece

Photos about my travels

Photos of me working on my laptop at various places
All of my photos, organized by location, from my trips.
Photos people like best, among those I have taken and posted here.
OSCON
More Photos from OSCON
my visit to Switzerland in May 2003 (and the same photos at the original photographer's site.)
Some pictures from Vaasa where I slipped on icy ground in the airport, broke my elbow, and gave my speech by telephone from the hospital bed
my trips to Greece
In Singapore in March 2001, a lovely parrot (50k jpeg) became enamored of me, while others enjoyed my recorder playing (91k jpeg)
my visit to China in May/June 2000. I also visited Tibet unawares, because nobody told me that JiuZhaiGou was part of Tibetan territory annexed by China since the conquest
my visit to Brazil: some from Rio de Janeiro and some from Porto Alegre where the Software Livre 2000 event was held.
my trip to Slovenia
A photo of me by Blake Livingston (may be used under CC-BY-SA).

Scientific Links

Homeopathy debunked, and thoroughly, as pseudoscience.

Some humor

Earth under attack from planet Koch.

On doxing, and how to spell it.

Futon Physics

A Spanish cartoon: La Ruleta Española. thumbnail

The Night before M-x-mas

Here I am wearing my "power tie".

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

New song (10/2013) - Poppycock

My Cartoons

My Puns in English (New pun: "Not signal processing", March 2016).

My Puns in Spanish (New pun: El jaguar muerde December 2015)

My Puns in French (New pun: "Pour l'émir, le chardonnay" 03/2016)

My Puns in Portuguese

My Puns in Italian (New 09/2014)

My Puns in German (New 02/2016)

Linguistic Swifties (Now with: Wintu, Penutian, Cochiti, Taos, and Towa.)

What Republicans Believe.

--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.

Pre-Zen Studies.

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.

Un malentendido gracioso.

ESR's favorite programming language: Objectivist C.

American Extremists

My Small Mouth

The huns and the writs. I don't know who wrote this, but I hope he does not object to sharing it here.

No Kludges in Cluj (June 2014)

Fiction

A science fiction story: Jinnetic Engineering (in Portuguese, Farsi, Spanish, Armenian, Russian, French, and Italian).

The Right to Read

Made for You (December 2012) (local copy)

Books

My book of essays about the philosophy of Software Freedom, is available from the GNU Press.

Non-Political Articles

My radio program of Music from Georgia, originally broadcast on WUOG in Athens, Georgia on Oct 13, 2014.

Resolving the trolley problem

Quantum Theory and Abortion Rights

A proposal for gender neutrality in Spanish, suitable for both speech and writing.

Origin of the POSIX name.

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".

My Childhood Sweetheart

Love and Dance

Predicting the attack on Pearl Harbor

Thanks

I would like to thank:

Positive Internet for sponsoring this web site.
Pawel Bokota, Lake Denman, Mark Eriksen, Eduardo Freitas, and Joe P. Lee for installing new text.
Mark Eriksen for providing the new search feature.
Craig Metrolis for working on making pages valid html.
John C. Vernaleo for helping to run the site.
Graziano Sorbaioli for improving the layout of the main page.

Please send comments on these web pages to rms at gnu period org.

Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire page are permitted provided this notice is preserved.
Verbatim copying and redistribution of any of the photos in the photos subdirectory is permitted under the Creative Commons Noderivs license version 3.0 or later. You can copy and redistribute the photo of me playing music to the butterfly under the Creative Commons Noderivs Nocommercial license version 3.0 or later. Any other photos of me in this (the toplevel) directory may be copied and redistributed under the Creative Commons Noderivs license version 3.0 or later.

Richard Stallman's Personal Site