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"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
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"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
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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.
For the sake of separation, this site has always been
hosted elsewhere and managed separately.
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 Stallman will give a talk titled "Free/Libre Software and Freedom in the Digital Society" at 4pm on April 15 at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas.
US citizens: call on Congress to stop private equity from taking over Americans' 401(k) retirement plans.
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 make the ultra rich pay their fair share.
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 investigate possible war profiteering.
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 censure the bully for threatening reporters with treason charges.
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 PBS and NPR funding.
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 the USDA to fully fund conservation programs.
US citizens: call on Congress not to cut funds for Americans' medicine for the sake of unjustified war.
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 Tell Congress: Reject any budget package that slashes basic needs programs to give additional billions to deportation and war.
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 universities to stand with he University of Pennsylvania to protect Jewish employees from federal persecution.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
Magats don't actually care about Jews, but they find "stopping antisemitism" a convenient excuse to persecute people who speak up for the rights of Palestinians. However, threatening Jews in the name of "stopping antisemitism" is even more perverse.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject the wrecker's proposed $1.5 trillion military budget.
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 your congresscritter and senators to fight any Republican scheme to cut funds for medical care or boost funds for war with Iran.
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 the Federal Trade Commission to ban junk fees for rental housing.
In my letter, I also said that would-be renters should not be required to use any web site in the process of seeking, accepting, occupying and paying for the rental. Those web sites are usually malicious, since they run nonfree software in the user's browser. And they do various sorts of snooping.
By raising this issue in your letter, you will support software freedom.
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 your congresscritter and senators to expand the investigation of torture of prisoners to all deportation prisons.
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 your state legislators to pass the Fossil-Free Insurers Act.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
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 Congress to stop private equity from taking over Americans' 401(k) retirement plans.
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 make the ultra rich pay their fair share.
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 investigate possible war profiteering.
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.
Orbán privately told Putin in October that he was at Putin's service.
Hungary voted authoritarian Orbán and his party out of power.
I have to wonder whether Peter Magyar, who only two years ago was a member of Orbán's party, wishes to undo all the damage Orbán has done. Has he said that he does?
Iran's conditions for ending the war include big demands.
Sharing the control between Iran and Oman might make it more acceptable as a demand.
The disagreement about what the supposedly agreed cease-fire with Iran requires has become sharp: Israel is back to bombing Lebanon and Iran has closed the straights of Hormuz again.
The temporary cease fire negotiations failed, so the monster is raging again and threatening attacks on Iran's vital civilian facilities, including water plants. Threats like that are just the thing to convince Iran's rulers they need nuclear weapons, like Mr Kim.
He also said the US would blockade the Straits of Hormuz, which basically repeats what Iran has already done, except that it would block Iran's oil exports as well as other countries' oil exports. Perhaps the two countries could take a step towards reconciliation by establishing joint patrols to make sure no oil exports travel through the straits ;-!
We would all be so much better off if the wrecker had not canceled the non-nuclear deal with Iran that Obama negotiated.
*Israel got away with targeting [medical facilities] in Gaza. It's no surprise it is doing it in Lebanon too.*
*Israel destroys entire villages in Lebanon.*
AIPAC is disguising its campaign funding through organizations which in no way indicate their connection with AIPAC, or that they choose candidates based on their positions about Israel and Palestine.
As expected, the Democratic National Committee rejected a resolution to condemn the influence of AIPAC, and of dark money generally.
It is dominated by "moderate" (right-wing) Democrats, who serve the power of rich donors. Some rich donors are Zionists, and some are evangelical Christians, and they support Israel's injustice towards Palestinians.
Meanwhile, almost all of them demand to keep most of America's wealth flowing to the rich, by rejecting the New Deal policies that most Americans support.
* The continental US registered its most abnormally hot month in 132 years of records.* And it will get worse and worse over the coming decades.
It may be possible to negotiate peace between the US and Iran, but the bully still thinks he can get total victory through willingness to cause damage.
The Straits of Hormuz tollbooth can be very lucrative for Iran (and maybe Oman too) until someone builds a competing toll road. One of the Gulf states (Qatar?) has a pipeline that bypasses the straits and arrives at the open sea, but it can carry only a fraction of the total rate of export. Part of the UAE's shore is outside the straits but it isn't set up to do all its export through there.
After a few years of construction, Qatar and the UAE could arrange to export their whole production, bypassing the straits by a wide margin.
Rubio decimated the US Foreign Service (at the wrecker's orders), firing (among others) the staff that had experience in organizing evacuations of American civilians from countries where war breaks out.
As a result, once the wrecker launched war against Iran and made an evacuation necessary, the US had no way to do it.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights was looking at the legality of the deadly US campaign of bombing boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean, but the US is now threatening to retaliate against it if it does that.
The corrupter has perverted the Justice Department to work systematically for the opposite of justice. It is prosecuting Cassidy Hutchinson for testifying to Congress about the corrupter's involvement in the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol.
The idea is that prosecuting her for "lying to Congress" will lead magats to blindly assume her testimony was false.
Russian psych-war agents are manipulating vulnerable Ukrainians to make and set off bombs near where they live.
To me it is incomprehensible that these efforts can succeed, but apparently they do.
Too much fishing for cod and mackerel, around Britain, is driving the population to extinction.
Regulation of hunting and fishing is one of the classic examples of how everyone can benefit in the long term by having a state that can make and enforce limits. The sea tends naturally to be an unregulated commons, because each fisher or boat crew may catch as much as it can or will. If some catch at an unsustainable rate, eventually that species will disappear and they will all be the worse for the loss.
It is possible for fishers to make a social agreement and keep it without a state. Lobster fishers in Maine and Canada adopted the practice of marking the pregnant lobsters they catch and throwing them back; this averted a previous crisis. (See The Secret Life of the Lobster by Trevor Corson.) But this sort of voluntary measure is harder to establish than to imagine, especially when fishing involves a big investment in a boat. A state can save all the fishers (and all the people who eat fish) from the consequences of their own temptation.
That is, the state can do so if it has the moral strength to stand firm against the the short-term thinking of the fishers who lobby to be "allowed to catch more so they don't go broke next year."
They could not stay in business very long after wiping out the fish, but they kid themselves that this can't really happen — until it does. Cod near North America were almost wiped out, and after protection was set up, they have remained at a low population for decades despite the prohibition of catching them. Apparently, once the population gets far too low, protection is not sufficient. It needs to be done before the disaster.
The British government lacks that moral strength, and has lacked it for a long time. I wonder what the E&W Green Party says about this.
Emperor penguins have been tagged an endangered species because global heating effects have killed a large fraction of them.
*US accused of pressuring Latin America to cut ties with Cuban doctors program.*
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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Richard Stallman
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