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"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
I'm looking for speaking invitations for a trip in January and February that will include some part of Europe, then India, then some other part of Europe.
The first visit to Europe will be roughly Jan 16 to 22. The visit to India will start Jan 22 and can continue into February. The second visit to Europe will be after that. Those dates are flexible.
One advantage of this period for you is that the intercontinental flights are already covered, so you won't need to pay for that.
If you are interested in inviting me, and you have a venue to use and a public to invite, please email me soon with "speaking invitation" in the Subject field, using the name rms and the host gnu dot org.
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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.
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 in Torino, Italy, February 12th at 17:00.
The talk will be at the Sala Ciminiera of the Department of Computer Engineering.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and call on per to sign a letter calling on the saboteur-in-chief to reinstate Gwynne Wilcox in the NLRB.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on the Senate to reject Bondi as attorney general.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on the acting IRS Commissioner: Continue to use your authority to crack down on wealthy tax cheats while you still can.
US citizens: call on schools to reject [the bully]'s Gulf of America imperialist fantasy.
In countries where Starbucks operates: Pledge to refuse to buy from Starbucks in solidarity with striking workers.
US citizens: call on Congress to hold the wrecker accountable for his illegal purge of Inspectors General.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on Congress to save Net Neutrality.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on the Senate to reject Kash Patel as head of the FBI.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on state governors to pass climate defense laws.
Please find your state governor's phone number at USA.gov
US citizens: call on the Senate to reject Mike Huckabee, the extremist nominee for U.S. Ambassador to Israel.
I'm looking for speaking invitations for a trip in January and February that will include some part of Europe, then India, then some other part of Europe.
The first visit to Europe will be roughly Jan 16 to 22. The visit to India will start Jan 22 and can continue into February. The second visit to Europe will be after that. Those dates are flexible.
One advantage of this period for you is that the intercontinental flights are already covered, so you won't need to pay for that.
If you are interested in inviting me, and you have a venue to use and a public to invite, please email me soon with "speaking invitation" in the Subject field, using the name rms and the host gnu dot org.
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.
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.
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.
Here are some quotations that I particularly like.
You can now read the political notes on Mastodon.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and call on per to sign a letter calling on the saboteur-in-chief to reinstate Gwynne Wilcox in the NLRB.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
*The Central Intelligence Agency offered [its staff "buyouts"], citing aim to bring agency in line with [new regime's] priorities, US media report.*
Making the whole staff hostile seems like a really foolish thing for an intelligence agency to do. Driving many agents to leave seems dumb too, since some will be angry enough to sell secrets to foreign countries.
Especially now that their country won't be the United States of constitutional rights that they used to be loyal to. Disobeying your country's rulers is not betrayal if they have betrayed your country already.
The corrupter said the US should take over Gaza and move all the inhabitants permanently to other countries. Implicitly, this would mean transferring them by force, although he claimed (implausibly) that they would be glad to move.
His proposal continues that the US would take over Gaza and rebuild it. It doesn't say who would own it after that. It would not surprise me if he arranged for this to be his property and exempted himself from paying taxes on it.
It has been suggested that this proposal is meant to distract attention from his attack on the US system of government.
*Democratic [New York] governor Kathy Hochul signs law permitting doctors to leave names off prescriptions for abortion pills.*
This is good, but if the organization that employs per is not limited to New York State, fanatics might be able to subpoena that name from that organization outside New York State. It would be enough to determine who that patient had an appointment with on the date the prescription was issued.
(satire) *Elon Musk Offers Self $10 Billion Federal Buyout.*
*Meta accused of "bowing" to [the corrupter] by making abortion [information] harder to find.*
Please join me in refusing to use the word "content" to mean "publications, treated as a commodity".
The wrecker's press secretary claims that he has already sent prisoners to Guantanamo, unauthorized immigrants who were in the US.
The wrecker, or someone working for him, has a cunning awareness of the US's sores, and picks at them to exacerbate the soreness. This spreads the feeling that the US will be so massively cruel and evil that it threatens to demoralize Americans who want their country to be good rather than cruel.
*The oldest bullying technique is to threaten little guys who don’t have nearly the power you have — say, Canada, Mexico, Columbia, and Greenland (Greenland!) — and then, when they appear to cave, announce that your bullying has worked. And then move on to larger targets.*
This is what the bully is doing now. But he has an additional advantage that so many treat anything he says as truth. He didn't get a surrender from Mexico or Canada, but when he boasts about one, his magats are thrilled that the USA is (in their minds) a powerful overlord.
But it is not guaranteed to stay that way. He could start doing to other countries the real damage he has done in USAID, the OPM, the US treasury, NOAA, and the CDC.
Another bullying tactic he uses is acting unpredictably and showing he can do drastic things (that less vicious leaders would be wise enough to avoid) and get away with them. The message is, "I am so powerful no one can restrain me — so be afraid and bow down."
Putin tried the same thing in his "I'm a madman with a nuke, so give me whatever I demand" act. Putin's disinformationists and supporters told us we should be terrified and meek. Biden and other western leaders realized it was an act, so they ignored it and dealt with Putin as someone evil and vicious but nonetheless sane.
The persecutor "paused" the CFPB's regulatory work, including the regulation not to include medical debt in people's credit reports.
This was a weak response to the problem that medical costs were ruining Americans, but it had the advantage that the executive branch could do it without support from Congress. The stronger measures were blocked by Republicans.
*FBI agents sue the … DoJ over effort to target January 6 investigation workers.*
Amerindians born before 1970 did not get birth certificates.
With the law to limit voter registration that Republicans are proposing now, in practice those Amerindians would be disenfranchised.
Arizona is making it easier for them to get birth certificates belatedly. But I would not be surprised if red states did the opposite, as a form of voter suppression.
*Grassroots & Progressive Democrats Call for Total Blockade of Trump Nominees.*
The problem of how ti rouse "mainstream" plutocratist Democrats to fight for a New Deal has been with us for decades.
Richard Stallman will give a talk in Torino, Italy, February 12th at 17:00.
The talk will be at the Sala Ciminiera of the Department of Computer Engineering.
Magats in Wyoming propose to prohibit many kinds of medical procedures in order to prohibit abortion as well.
It seems their prohibition on causing harm *to the heart, lungs, brain and other organs* is meant to refer to the organs of a fetus, but would also cover those that harm to the patient's own organs, and that is an unavoidable cost of many important treatments. For instance cancer treatments often damage some organs, but patients accept that because it is preferable to dying.
The Department of Transportation has imposed the irrelevant requirement on cities and states not to make mask or vaccine requirements. Also the irrelevant preference for places that have higher marriage and birth rates.
The magats who have seized the US government are looking for every way to impose their religion and their superstition on all Americans.
*Why the wrecker's tariffs will be "very bad for America and for the world".*
I think the bully intends these tariffs as a threats and expects other countries to pay a big ransom — going beyond money — to avoid them.
If they do, the world economic harm of the tariffs themselves will not occur, or not for long. But that would introduce a global empire of the billionaires, who will steadily impoverish everyone else and eventually wipe out most of humanity through global heating.
The wrecker has got rid of many of the staff of USAID and sent the muskrat's dogs to destroy it.
The persecutor has canceled the temporary permission of 300,000 Venezuelans to stay in the US, and has threatened 300,000 more.
They fled Venezuela due to economic collapse caused by US sanctions against Maduro's government, rejecting it as the US encouraged them to do.
Maduro is a tyrant, and action against his rule can be justified in principle. And the US claimed to be acting for the sake of Venezuelans who were suffering from it. It was proper for the US to act on concern for Venezuelans that suffered as a result, especially if they wanted to cease their allegiance to Maduro.
However, with the persecutor it is "all hatred, all the time".
Just remember, if you support him and you are not a billionaire, your turn to be his victim will come.
Marco Rubio has gone to Panama, perhaps to play the role of "good cop" in contrast to the bully as "bad cop".
It would be dangerous for a repressive, expansionist great power, led by a megalomaniac liar, to take control of the Panama Canal or systems it depends on.
*Georgian police have arrested two opposition leaders during a street protest against the ruling party, which has been accused of democratic backsliding and of moving Tbilisi closer to Russia.*
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.
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
A song parody, Colors of the Lisp, by Jefferson Carpenter.
The text to a filk song, Johnny v. N., by Paul Rubin.
I would like to thank:
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