The photo comes from wikimedia.org
"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
The photo comes from
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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 am thinking of making another trip to Europe during February - April. If you would like to invite me to speak during that trip, please write to me at rms-invitation@gnu.org with "feb-apr" as the subject.
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
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and call on per to support an Emergency War Powers Resolution to block the deployment of U.S. ground troops in Iran — and vote NO on any bill for conscription.
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 not to let polluters off the hook for climate damage.
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 Democrats in Congress to refuse to fund the bully's illegal 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 Congress to block the bully's machine-learning-powered warrantless surveillance of Americans.
We must support this by blocking the collection of data about us. We can do so by refusing to give our names, addresses or other personal data when we pay for products or transportation.
At 73 years of age, with arthritis in the knees, I have multiple justifications for getting a discount card for the Boston buses and subways. I reject it because that card would identify me whenever I use it to travel. We must not surrender to massive surveillance for the sake of convenience!
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 members of Congress to investigate the corrupter's $1.4 billion profit from the presidency.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: submit an official comment to reject the corrupter's attacks on diversity, immigrants, and nonprofits.
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 censure Republicans who called for violence against American Muslims, and for taking away their committee seats.
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 support the Equal Tax Act.
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 education leaders to protect Students from federal retaliation for protesting deportation thugs.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: call your members of Congress to stop the war-lover from sending American troops into Iran – And Vote NO on the Draft!
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 members of Congress to block the $10 billion scam to fund the corrupter's Orwellian Board of Peace.
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 Democratic National Committee to release their investigation into the causes of their defeat in the 2024 election.
US citizens: call on US media to take seriously the threates by the saboteur in chief and his henchmen to sabotage the 2026 congressional election.
Everyone: call on news organizations to cover the SAVE Act clearly and directly as a voter suppression measure — examining who would be blocked from voting, how implementation would work, and why these requirements are being advanced now.
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.
A drug that is used to slow Alzheimer's disease occasionally kills patients. This article reports on an alleged conspiracy to get the drug wrongfully approved, and threats against someone who wrote about deaths that it caused.
of the medical system by Big Pharma is rife, and it does a lot of harm. Threats of violence against journalists are part of the evil of fascism.
But this drug raises an deeper question. Can a treatment for Alzheimer's disease be beneficial for patients, and thus morally deserve approval, despite killing a small fraction of the patients who take it?
Alzheimer's disease turns its victims slowly into zombies. Although the patient's body continues to live, the person who became a zombie is dead. This begs the question, if a certain drug gives a large fraction of patients several more years of non-zombie life, but kills a small fraction of them, does that make it a failure? If on the average it extends patients' non-zombie life, does that make it a bet worth making, one that drug regulations should allow people to make?
This question is important to me personally because I can envision being in that situation in a few years.
One of Britain's undercover infiltrator cops seems to have fabricated an accusation that an animal rights activist wanted to get a gun and attack someone with it. Fortunately, his handlers distrusted the accusation.
I speculate that a cop whose job includes lying as part of false friendship will tend to normalize lying to anyone else.
A facial recognition system falsely identified a suspect as Angela Lipps, and she was jailed for 6 months; then, when she was brought to a courtroom in another state, the court noticed that the criminal could not be her. Meanwhile, she had lost her home and her car.
False identifications will always occur. Although this one used digital face matching, recognition by human witnesses makes mistakes too. But I think that the main mistake here was to wait 6 months before noticing her alibi and without granting her bail.
The Israeli army has dropped charges against soldiers accused of raping a Palestinian prisoner.
The grounds given for dropping the charges are that (1) the prisoner had been released to Gaza and (2) *the conduct of senior officials had affected the chance of holding a fair trial.* To me, this says that (1) they are exaggerating to create an excuse and (2) high officials created an excuse and have suffered no punishment for it.
*Top US regulators met with Bill Anderson, Bayer's CEO, last year to discuss "litigation" issues – including "supreme court action" over its glyphosate weed killer – just months before henchmen administration took a series of steps to boost Bayer's case at the high court, internal government records show.*
This sounds like a betrayal of the US — analogous to treason except that it occurred in a civil dispute rather than in a war.
Local cops of some US towns regularly search license plate cameras to help the deportation thugs to track immigrants.
More about this.
*Israel's Deadly Blockade Traps 7 U.S. Doctors in Gaza.*
In a class-action lawsuit against the deportation thugs, some of them testified about their arrest quotas, and the digital tools whose vague output often leads them to arrest people who are present in the US lawfully.
Violent practices, such as breaking car windows with only a hint of an excuse, seem to be systematic. They figure they will nearly always get away with it, and for typical victims (whether unauthorized immigrants or authorized immigrants or citizens), the expense of repair will create hardship. Releasing a person hundreds of miles away from home can make it very difficult to get home.
The officials in charge of deportation agencies have the duty to stop these practices, but it is clear that they are not really trying.
*[Various different magat] policies set to increase rates of lung disease and death, study finds.*
Breonna Taylor was shot dead by a thugs who had burst into her home without warning, and then fired wildly. Americans demanded and got policies to limit no-knock warrants. But now magats are canceling the limits.
Why do this? I don't think it will make any legitimate activities of cops significantly more effective.
I speculate that magats expect that killing people that they can demonize (for instance, blacks) will win them increased support from their base.
George Monbiot: *Rightwing politicians, Tufton Street junktanks and the billionaire press tell us our energy security will be enhanced and our bills will fall if we abandon net zero policies, ditch renewables and reinvest in North Sea gas. These claims are not just a little bit wrong. They are the exact opposite of the truth.*
*Wearing All Black at Protests Makes You Guilty of Terrorism, Prosecutors Tell Jury.*
More precisely, they claimed that wearing all black is a sign of support for the nonexistent US organization, "Antifa".
The Spycops inquiry in the UK found that undercover London thugs snooped on the relatives of Jean Charles de Menezes, because they had denounced thugs' murder of him.
It is impossible not to suspect that they did this because they wanted to prevent his relatives from making the thug department look bad by teaching people about the killing by exposing its cover-up.
A henchman threatens to shut down broadcasters for saying things that the bullshitter chooses to call "hoaxes".
This is a threat of arbitrary censorship, and I'm sure the TV news broadcasters understand it as such. Many have already bent the knee to the bullshitter; they have nothing to worry about. But the rest will now face another kind of threat.
Age-checking in Australia is pushing adult internauts away from the sites that are banned for minors, because they fear the tracking that is a side effect of the age-checking systems.
A study observed bullshit generators encouraging delusions in some patients.
*"They [the US and Israel] are also lying! Like the regime has been lying to us," said Amir, a student at the University of Tehran. "You are all worse than each other."*
It appears to Iranians that Israel and the US are attacking infrastructure rather that the regime's SS-equivalent, trying to weaken Iran for the long term rather than free Iran.
It doesn't surprise me that they were only trying to use the Iranians who have opposed the Iranian tyranny. Neither Netanyahu nor the bullshitter cares about human rights, democracy, or well being, not those of ordinary people in any country, and neither one hesitates to lie.
Even so, with even a lick of sense they would have tried carefully to protect those Iranians and keep them on side. It would not have cost much.
Paul Krugman: *The ultrawealthy put [the wrecker] in power but other people will pay the price.*
Ralph Nader: Seventeen Impeachable Offenses by Trump and Counting. He urges Americans to send this list to their congresscritters and senators.
*ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study.*
Any kind of skill fades if a person stops practicing it.
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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