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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.
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
![[America Means Civil Liberties / Patriotism Means Protecting
Them / www.aclu.org/safefree ]](flag_set_vectorized.png)
US citizens: call on congresscritter to increase taxes on rich The bullshitter has lately been talking about increasing taxes on the non-billionaire rich. Phone your congresscritter (especially if perse is Republican) and call on per to do this, instead of cutting Medicaid and other things that help the non-rich.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support two bills introduced by Representative Don Beyer to correct and prevent slasher attacks against federal agencies:
* The REHIRE Act would give hiring preference to the career professionals wrongfully removed by Trump. This would go a long way toward restoring the knowledge, continuity, and skill that our institutions need.
* The PREP Act would protect future public servants from being fired for political reasons — so that no president can again purge government employees simply for doing their jobs.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on NIH and NSF: Stop cutting critical medical research.
US citizens: Sign the Grassroots Amicus Brief: "DOGE" is Unconstitutional.
US citizens: call on Congress to protect the right of habeas corpus.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: phone your congresscritter at 202-688-0628 to oppose the Republican bill that would allow certain officials to cancel the tax exemption of any tax-exempt organization.
Here's what Free Press Action recommends saying:
Hello! My name is [first name]. I'm a constituent and am calling to ask Rep. [congresscritter] to oppose language in the budget-reconciliation legislation that would empower the Secretary of the Treasury to target nonprofits' tax-exempt status.This dangerous language lacks adequate safeguards against abuse, violates due process and would hand unchecked power to the administration to politically target nonprofits.
Reject executive overreach no matter what form it takes.
US citizens: call on Congress to Protect NIH Funding for Lifesaving Research.
US citizens: call on the FTC to maintain its ban on noncompete agreements. Noncompete agreements restrict a worker who has quit or been fired from getting another job in the same field.
Here's how to make the actionnetwork.org letter campaign linked above work without running the site's nonfree JavaScript code. (See https://gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html for why to avoid running it.)
First, make sure you have deactivated JavaScrupt in your browser or are using the LibreJS plug-in.
I have done the next step for you: I added `?nowrapper=true' to the end of the campaign URL before posting it above. That should bring you to a page that starts with, "Letter campaigns will not work without JavaScript!"
They indeed won't work without some manual help, but the following simple method seems adequate for many of them, including this one.
To start, fill in the personal information answers in the box on the right side of the page. That's how you say who's sending the letter.
Then click the "START WRITING" button. That will take you to a page that can't function without nonfree JavaScript code. (To ensure it doesn't function perversely _by running_ that nonfree code, you can enable LibreJS or disable JavaScript by visiting that page.) You can finish sending without that code By editing its URL in the browser's address bar, as follows:
First, go to the end and insert `&nowrapper=true'. Then tell the browser to visit that URL. This should give you a version of the page that works without JavaScript. Edit the subject and body of your letter. Finally, click on the "SEND LETTER" button, and you're done.
This method seems to work for letter campaigns that send the letters to a fixed list of recipients, the same recipients for every sender. Editing and revisiting the URL is the only additional step needed to bypass the nonfree JavaScript code. I'm sure you'll agree it is a small effort for the result of supporting the campaign without opening your computer to unjust (and potentially malicious) software.
US citizens: Call on Congress to implement for real the promise of wellbeing that the cheater falsely made to Americans.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and call on per to save the CFPB.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on the FCC commissioners to stop trying to censor broadcast news that disagrees with the corrupter.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and call on per to stop the attorney general from persecuting the press by searching reporters and forcing them to testify about their sources.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
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.
An interview with Kseniia Petrova, jailed by the deportation thugs who falsely claimed she lied about the frog embryo samples she was bringing to the Harvard research lab where she works.
The claim that she concealed the frog embryos is absurd. She not only told the US government about the frog embryos, she arranged in advance for a license to import them. That has to be why they targeted her.
I wonder if the bully's agents chose her as part of a campaign to punish Harvard for not submitting to the bully.
Oklahoma's public schools will add explicit right-wing political indoctrination to the recently established Christian indoctrination.
This is clearly unconstitutional, but it is not clear that we can trust the right-wing Supreme Court to vote to recognize that.
*The US, UK and other [countries] routinely flout international law. That's why there’s scant hope for a new tribunal on crimes against Ukraine.*
*How [the corrupter]'s "historic" Gulf state deals benefit a handful of powerful men.*
Israel has intensified the bombing of Gaza, but the famine that it is imposing will be even more deadly.
The wrecker and the Supreme Court seem to be heading for a showdown about whether he is a dictator.
Will some of the wrecker's slavish sycophants in Congress be willing to put him in his place, as a mere president under a constitution living in a world of reality? Or will he succeed in making a monkey out of the two?
*European "green" investments hold billions in fossil fuel majors.*
*Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa decries ‘nightmare’ of Putin-Trump alliance.*
Things don't seem to be going in that direction just now, and the would-be emperor has been threatening Putin. But that could change if Putin gives him a certain minimum amount of submission.
Norman Solomon: the US government and news media have never dropped their pretense that the US intervention in Vietnam was moral and admirable. The US was not at all like that, and neither was the other side. Ironically, the North Vietnamese government established a corrupt dictatorship over all of Vietnam and is now more or less allied with the US against Vietnam's traditional main enemy, China.
A study found that erroneous citations are rife in the output of LLM-based search engines.
Please don't describe them as "intelligence" — that term spreads propaganda that makes them seem more capable than they are.
*The [persecutor] appears to be laying the groundwork for a global gulag for expelled immigrants.*
(satire) *U.S. Military Bans Men With Girl Names From Combat.*
The wrecker is trying by executive order to undo the Supreme Court decisions that ruled that unnecessary job requirements which have a discriminatory effect violate US civil rights law.
Another middle-finger nomination of an Amazon executive for head of OSHA. If he was happy at Amazon, whose warehouses are as deadly in reality as werewolves are in fiction, we can't expect him to try very hard to carry out OSHA's mission.
Ralph Nader warns that the elimination of cash and unchecked credit card practices are threatening core consumer rights—including privacy, autonomy, and equal access to commerce.
And tend to make living more expensive for poor people.
In the last year I have been to a number of major Boston-area hospitals. I usually had to pay a copay for the visit, but when I took out cash to pay it, the agent said that the hospital does not accept cash and would bill me instead. I have a way to pay that bill because I have a checking account, but many poor people don't have that.
When buying products, if not on prescription, I won't use a check either. It's cash or nothing!
You can defend cash without taking an unyielding stand like mine. Just make sure to carry some cash whenever you leave the house. If you don't have enough cash for something you want to buy, don't pay by card! Instead, go to an ATM and withdraw the cash you need, then pay with that. The bank will know where you withdrew the cash but will not know what you spent it on.
Labour has gone so far to resemble the Tories that it now proposes deregulation of construction in much the same way that Tories did in 2021,
It is even getting advice from the same lobbyists!
Just as the government increasingly punishes protesters for wearing masks, the deportation thugs that grab people off the street are wearing masks.
The corrupter's attitude towards many government policies (those he doesn't personally care about) is that they are merchandise for sale.
The antivaxer in charge of vaccination in the US proposes to eliminate updated Covid-19 vaccines for the latest version. And maybe also for flu vaccine, which for years had been updated each year for the variants expected to be most widespread that year.
Salafi Arabia has sentenced visiting Briton Ahmed al-Doush to 10 years in prison for a tweet. (There is no information here about what that tweet said.)
The article condemns the UK government for not doing enough to win freedom for him. I hesitate to say that, because we cannot assume there was anything the UK could have done to achieve this.
We can all keep ourselves safe from direct violence by never going to Salafi Arabia. Making the US safe from corruption from Salafi Arabia would require a different president.
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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