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"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
The photo comes from
wikimedia.org
"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
US citizens: call on Congress to protect the independence of the Office on Violence Against Women.
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 Congress to pass a law prohibiting the bully's slush fund (paid by the treasury and available to reward whoever he chooses).
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 Pass the ROBINHOOD Act, which would deny use of a tax avoidance scheme by people who are VERY rich.
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 senators to defeat environmental protection rollbacks in the Senate permitting bill.
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 governor to give workers support in unionizing.
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 Congress to investigate the DOJ's prosecution of the Broadview Six.
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 corrupter to reimburse the Treasury for his $19 million ad campaign.
Note, the reimbursement should be to the Treasury, from which the corrupter took the money, not to the individual taxpayers who paid it to the Treasury.
US citizens: Stand with Ilhan Omar: condemn the raid on her home.
US citizens: call on Congress to stop the corrupter from privatizing Social Security.
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.
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 protect the independence of the Office on Violence Against Women.
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 Congress to pass a law prohibiting the bully's slush fund (paid by the treasury and available to reward whoever he chooses).
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.
The US-supported government of Somalia arrested and tortured journalists, then thugs threatened to kill them if they continued covering the case of a woman who reports being tortured in prison.
I am curious why they tortured that woman. I suppose it was for political reasons, but what reasons? What criticism is it that those thugs really want to suppress?
Countries with longer average working hours tend to have more obesity.
Israel's Minister of Culture, Miki Zohar, called the (Israeli) directors of the documentary NAZA "traitors" and said he would cancel their citizenship.
The documentary shows Israelis' choosing to put the lives of Palestinian noncombatants in danger, with the result of killing many of them.
In the eyes of officials committed to burying the truth, citizens who don't support the mandatory lies are "traitors".
The plutocratist party that governs Queensland proposes to eliminate the public's right to oppose mine projects.
This is in the name of "streamlining" decisions to let rich people destroy nature and public health.
*Judge blocks the bully's new short limits on how long foreign students and journalists can stay in US.*
Private jets get a substantial discount in the US on their aviation tax
The article says they are also "more polluting", and it could well be true, but the claim is not precise enough for me to tell whether it means anything.
*Witnesses recount Israeli "double-tap" strike that killed child and medic in Gaza.*
A prestigious demand to the government of Eritrea for proof that writers jailed in 2001 are still alive.
Putin has ordered Russians to use a new communication/surveillance app and various institutions are pressuring people to switch to it for various purposes. It implements full surveillance of most activities on the phone. It fully demonstrates the Orwellian potential of the nonfree software and malicious hardware in those devices.
If I needed to use such an app to get into school buildings and my dorm, I think I could develop a non-computerized method of cooperation for door opening.
Formerly imprisoned US protester Mahmoud Khalil has published a memoir about the persecutor's efforts to expel him from the US for peaceful protest.
He points out another injustice of private prisons: they make more money if they keep you in prison longer. This is in addition to various other injustices.
He says "Columbia turned out to be a real estate empire with a campus attached"; its board of trustees is "not so much a neutral administrative body as a deeply ideological one … drawn overwhelmingly from finance, real estate, corporate law, and weapons manufacturers."
If you want to buy this book, or any book, I urge you not to use nonfree software to do it, and especially not Amazon.
Nonprofit medical treatment organizations are increasingly setting up joint ventures with private equity, whose values are typically "profit regardless of the consequences".
These joint ventures often permit extraction of additional profit from the medical activities.
Two competing candidates for county prosecutor in Minneapolis claim each to be the best for prosecuting deportation thugs.
I do not use the euphemistic term "ICE" for the deportation thugs, but I agree with the point.
Supposed Intelligence agents, when allowed to communicate directly, gradually developed a strange dialect of English, apparently for convenience of expression. Sometimes humans figure out the phrases, but that is not guaranteed.
This throws a wrench into plans to monitor agents for safety. We might not recognize that "linkmaxxing" means fabricating as many paperclips as possible.
The deportation thugs have seized Luis Galeano, a Nicaraguan exiled from Nicaragua for criticizing the dictatorship.
In general I would expect the persecutor to cozy up to dictator Ortega, because he generally wants to ally with dictators. Some Republicans in Congress are standing up for Galeano. I hope they stand firm for him, but I expect that the bully will bully them into supporting his line.
A TV coverage pool including ABC, CBS, CNN, Faux News and NBC declined to cover one of the corrupter's publicity events, because it was CNN's turn to cover this event and the corrupter had banned CNN.
*The Iran war reminds us: we'll never be energy-independent with fossil fuels.
Energy security comes from using local, renewable resources to power, heat and cool communities, as Ukraine is doing.*
Planning to defend the November election from magat thugs, even if they are "official" federal thugs.
A few years ago, the UK agreed to require some associated semi-colonies to publicly record who owns each company. They agreed to do this, then they cleverly screwed up the implementation such that investigators can't get useful data.
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:
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