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.
![[America Means Civil Liberties / Patriotism Means Protecting
Them / www.aclu.org/safefree ]](flag_set.png)
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.
US citizens: call on the Bureau of Land Management to
stop
selling leases to extract oil and natural gas.
US citizens: call for an
investigation
of the pharma company Gilead for tax dodging.
US citizens:
Oppose voter
suppression measures.
US citizens: call for
adding a public
insurance plan option to Obama's medical care system.
US citizens: Call on the DOJ to hold Wells Fargo executives accountable for the recently admitted massive fraud against large numbers of customers.
More Information
US citizens: Call on Democrats to
push
for a public option for medical coverage.
This was part of Obama's original proposal, but lobbying from private
insurance companies pressure Congress to remove it. Now we see
the
results they were lobbying for.
Private insurance is the wrong model for medical care,
since everyone needs that and we must make sure no one is left out.
US citizens: call on the Department of Justice to
investigate
harassment of people that document thugs' violence, and train
thugs to respect their rights.
US citizens: call for an
investigation
of the Crosscheck scheme for disenfranchizing minority voters.
US citizens: call on Obama to make the EPA take quick action to
protect
pollinators.
Everyone: call for
dropping
charges against Amy Goodman.
Everyone: sign this petition
opposing
the merger of Bayer and Monsanto.
EU citizens: sign the
Change Copyright
petition.
I post this while holding my nose about some points in the formulation
of the petition. For instance, its mention of Facebook and Instagram
without condemnation grants them undeserved legitimacy. Also, it
describes publications as "content".
These are definitely not all the changes needed in copyright in the EU,
but they are needed and they are not bad.
The page malfunctions with LibreJS, but it does work when
Javascript is entirely disabled.
US citizens: call on Obama to
revoke
the permits for the Dakota Access Pipeline.
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.
-
To treat a payment to a foreign company as a tax-deductable
business expense, that company should have to disclose its
true owners, and whatever other information is needed to
prevent tax dodging.
-
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
Earth
under attack from planet Koch.
On doxing, and how to spell it.
Futon Physics
A Spanish cartoon: La Ruleta
Española. 
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 (06/2016)
- Si la face ay pale.
My Cartoons
My Puns in English
(Seeking efficiency, September 2016).
My Puns in Spanish
(New pun: El jaguar muerde
December 2015)
My Puns in French
(Bouddiste
08/2016)
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)
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)
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.
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
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
