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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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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
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.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to do more than pass the Ban Flock Act. They should pass laws to require all systems that track the public to be designed so that a signed judicial warrant is required to look at the data on any particular person. So I suggest using this action, but rewriting the request to demand more.
Here's how I rewrote the letter text.
Flock surveillance cameras are known for tracking vehicles through their license plates. They also track people by facial recognition. They may do other sorts of general surveillance as well. This surveillance is Orwellian; it creates a danger such as Orwell foresaw.
Regulating only license plate recognition, and only by federal agencies, is only a partial remedy. What we need is to regulate systems that collect data that can be used to track people and find out their activities, so that a specific judicial warrant is required to obtain the data about a person.
Please pass laws to protect Americans from general surveillance, and to require that new digital communication standards be designed to protect us from whoever wants to play Big Brother.
Sincerely,
In How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand, I argue that cameras that can track people should not be connected to any networks. To find out who the camera has recorded should require physically accessing it.
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 congresscritter and senators to sign the bipartisan pledge to uphold midterm election results once certified by states.
The point is, that means resisting magats' preannounced attempts to sabotage the elections that don't go their way.
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 state governors to reject paying state funds to vouchers that support private schools.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call for legislation to prohibit congresscritters and their family members from owning stock in so-called "artificial intelligence" companies.
I reject the marketing term "artificial intelligence" so I refuse to use it.
US citizens: call on the Census Bureau to withdraw the proposed voter-suppressing tax records requirement.
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 investigate the Iran war casualty cover-up.
This is not as big a wrong as launching that war, but it is a good way to attack the magats who did that.
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 states to include data centers in climate defense regulation.
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.
*Egyptian journalist faces terrorism charges after entire newsroom [jailed].*
*Last week, authorities arrested six journalists from the independent fact-checking and investigative platform Matsadaash – literally meaning "don't believe" – accusing them in a statement of being unlicensed and publishing false news on behalf of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.*
I have no basis to judge whether Matsadaash really supports the Muslim Brotherhood in any way. I also have no basis to judge whether Matsadaash advocates terrorism, though I don't think that the Muslim Brotherhood generally does that. But I don't trust the Egyptian military government's word — or its thugs — enough to take those accusations seriously just because the rulers say so.
The Muslim Brotherhood, when it is in power, would surely practice discrimination against non-Muslims, and perhaps even worse against Atheists such as me. But the Egyptian military government does that too.
Wikipedia: Blasphemy law in Egypt
The Green Party of England and Wales has voted to categorize "Zionism" as racism, and call for the elimination of Israel.
Many members of the Green Party disagree with that decision, and it may split the party. That disappoints me greatly, because on issues of environment and survival, the Green Party most deserves support.
I advocate creating a democratic state of Palestine alongside Israel and for both states to recognize and protect human rights and other individual rights of all persons.
*The Guardian view on the Green party and Palestine: rejecting two states is no shortcut to peace.*
A survey of various countries, repeated over time, found that people spoke an average of 16,000 words per day in 2005, but this decreased gradually to under 13,000 per day in 2019.
A register of British people who profited directly from the slave trade shows that this form of "investment" pervaded English, later British, business and high society for a long time.
How the FBI finds excuses to meddle in US politics and repress views that the US government disapproves of.
Political accusations pressured the University of Arkansas into firing an Iranian-American professor based on allegations of "antisemitism" and working with the Iranian government, and of course allegations of plagiarism.
The faculty committee in charge rejected the criticism, but the administration fired her anyway. Now she is suing the university.
I have seen no facts about this case except what appears in that article. So I cannot assert, of my own knowledge, that she did not engage in antisemitism, that she was not working with the Iranian government, or that she did not violate the academic standards for citing previous work. But at least as for the last of those three, I am sure the faculty committee knows those standards and studied the question.
That they voted to support her unanimously is proof enough that the plagiarism accusation is bogus. Since all three accusations are standard in the playbook for getting rid of professors who don't stick to the magat political line, I expect they are all bogus.
The more parents keep tabs on their children, the more anxious it makes them.
When British colonists took Australia, they stopped setting fires and allowed trees to grow big and form thick forests, which enabled bigger and hotter fires. Measurements at one site document this change over time.
Generating mathematical results using secret LLMs threatens the openness of the mathematical community.
I suggest that results that mathematicians in general can neither verify or invalidate be considered mere conjectures.
Britons who spent their first years under the WWII sugar rationing, which lasted until 1953, tend to have better health in many ways.
A study of the behavior of TikTok, Instagram, and ex-Twitter towards users of age 18-24 found that they boost right-wing views substantially. This survey was done in Finland, France and Romania.
Local user groups in Britain are often used to spread lies, and people pay little attention to more careful news sources.
Qatar and Jordan persist in repression of Abdullah Ibhais's testimony about Qatar's cruelty to workers building stadiums for the soccer world cup.
Arguing that the best way to make machine learning companies contribute to the public treasury is to tax their energy use, and the best way to pressure them to respect freedom is to make a public activity to compete with them.
I must however criticize the assumption that "adherence to copyright" is, in a blanket way, a good thing. There has been no let-up in the use of copyright as an excuse to impose control on your computers.
Hegseth proposes to transmit a live stream of execution.
Fascists know that inviting people to watch, from a safe distance, acts of violence is likely to make some of them crave more violence. They want to teach their followers to crave violence, as a threat against their opponents.
Robert Reich: Due to magat corruption, food safety scandals are spreading through cooking in the US.
A new idea for housing for the poor in the UK: donating unbuilt land to community groups.
The Putin forces are bombarding buses full of civilians in Ukraine, killing many.
*World must change way it produces food to avoid biodiversity collapse, says WWF.* Total world populations of 5,000 wild vertebrates have declined by around 3/4, on some sort of average, since 1970. I wouldn't assign precise meaning to that figure, but it shows the magnitude of the threat humanity poses to itself.
The bully pressured various governments to drop support for a conference about disinformation.
It is not surprising that the event planned to discuss the idea of the US government as a source of disinformation, but it is distressing that the EU and Canada are afraid to acknowledge this.
The madman said, "They (Iran) can take out a city. Let them take – let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. That's – this is a very small price to pay, and it's going to be over with very soon." What does this signify?
Up to the words "Let them take out San Diego", it sounded like direct encouragement for a foreign enemy of the US to destroy US cities. That's what the madman's audience cheered.
The rest of the text changes the spirit subtly. He was not wishing for those cities to be destroyed, merely saying that their destruction, implying the killing of as many as 20 million Americans, would be no great loss.
I never thought he cared
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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