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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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I expect to have a trip to Europe in May - June. The start and end dates remain to be decided.
If you would like to invite me to speak during that trip, please write to me now so we can start discussing it. Write to `-invitation' following my three-letter username.
My talks consist of an hour of presentation and an hour of Q&A. The overall focus is software and freedom, but generally the talk includes various subtopics; we can discuss which subtopics together.
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: call the Dept of Energy to cancel its plan to fund an increase in coal mining.
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 senators to oppose and filibuster the CLARITY 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 congresscritter and senators to block the corrupter's exploitative deal with the IRS.
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 block the cheater's medical debt trap.
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 head of OSHA to resign in disgrace.
US citizens: call on Congress to investigate the issuance of subpoenas to Reddit and ex-Twitter which aim to identify people who anonymously posted political statements that reproach the deportation thugs.
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 FIFA to stop fueling global climate disaster.
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 senators to fight the wrecker's USPS Board takeover.
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.
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.
The UK government has promised to abolish the system of "zero-hours contracts", in which a worker must be ready to work on short notice and cannot plan per life in advance based on the work schedule. Naturally, businesses claim that reducing their "flexibility" will make everyone suffer.
Of course, business lobbyists want the government to neglect all the harm that this imposed "flexibility" tends to do to the worker. Of course, they presume that business's profits outweigh all other factors, and they argue for this based on the absurd "trickle down" model of economics — often veiled so that it might seem more plausible.
The "trickle down" model trains citizens and politicians to truckle to business. We can call the result a "truckle down" economy.
Businesses that want to benefit from "flexibility" about a worker's hours should be required to pay the worker for that flexibility, each time.
Here's an example of how that might work. Canceling all or part of an agreed shift, less than a week before, would legally require paying the worker 1/4 of the normal pay rate for the cancelled hours, as well as arranging additional working hours for per as a replacement so that per total hours are not decreased.
I do not claim that those specific details are optimal. The details can be adjusted — the point is to illustrate the general idea.
Thugs in the UK acted as if they believed Palestine Action were really a terrorist organization: harassing one supporter and then trying to pressure him into being a spy in the group.
Palestine Action is a political campaigning group, not a terrorist group; but once a government endorses a false accusation, the normal operation of its laws and procedures will turn into harassment and worse.
*CBS News veterans urge Paramount CEO to "uphold editorial independence" at 60 Minutes.*
This approach is worth trying — there is little else we can try to protect the main US news media from becoming even more subjugated by big business.
The Paramount billionaire owners of CBS are firing reporters who won't be subservient. Some decided to go down fighting.
The Minnesota Republican Convention publicly honored the ex-cop Derek Chauvin who is in prison for the murder of George Floyd.
That murder touched off Black Lives Matter protests across the US.
Senator Ellison condemned this, but based seems to have based that on its hurtfulness to specific persons. That is true, but it is a side issue. Indeed, the Republicans' gesture was hurtful, but it was far worse than that!
Their act of Chauvinism can only be understood as glorification of murder and promotion of racism. They deserve to be excoriated -- and every politician who participated ought to be confronted with this during the election campaign. "Representative So-and-So, do you endorse the murder of George Floyd? If so, was it because he was black, or because he was helpless, or because the murderer was a uniformed thug?"
The article linked to at the beginning displays symbolic bigotry by capitalizing "black" but not "white". (To avoid endorsing bigotry, capitalize both words or neither one.) I denounce bigotry, and normally I will not link to articles that practice it. But I make exceptions for some articles, such as that one, because they are morally important and I don't want to let the racists they rebuke off the hook.
I will not give the gross bigotry of racism a pass on account of smaller bigotries of anti-racism. Instead I reproach them both.
China is suborning treachery in Britain among Chinese-English interpreters that handle calls to government agencies from visitors from China, especially if they are talking about Chinese repression.
China puts a lot of effort into repression of Chinese visiting other countries or finding refuge in them.
Some US cities are imposing curfews on minors. Baltimore is avoiding heavy-handed policing when they are teenagers, but in the case of actual children, it looks like this might lead to punishing parents who don't control the children all the time (or have to work at night).
After the US civil war, Congress passed laws to protect the rights of freed slaves. The Supreme Court, mainly right-wing, erased them.
That is similar to what is happening now.
To experience forced marriage, rape, and murder is not unusual for girls in Iraq.
I wonder whether these things happened when Saddam Hussein was in charge.
The wrecker's henchmen made a deal to pay a billion dollars of taxpayers' money to Total Energies to avoid finishing two mostly completed offshore wind farms. Six states are suing to cancel this deal.
The deal illustrates the perversity of the wrecker's support for fossil fuel, because it provides no possible benefit to anyone except fossil fuel companies. (Total is primarily a fossil fuel company itself.)
The California Democratic primary for governor pits Tom Steyer, a progressive billionaire, against Xavier Becerra, a corporate Democrat supported by non-progressive billionaires.
US citizens: call the Dept of Energy to cancel its plan to fund an increase in coal mining.
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 senators to oppose and filibuster the CLARITY 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 congresscritter and senators to block the corrupter's exploitative deal with the IRS.
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 block the cheater's medical debt trap.
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.
Garbage incinerators don't burn PFAs, they spread them into the environment.
US Republicans tend to shorten their life spans, and their spans of healthy life, through superstitious ideological rejection of medicine.
Democrats experience the same flawed medical system but they accept the good it can do for them, while demanding rational improvement.
People in Texas believe that safety in schools depends on having lots of cops around, but what actual cops actually do in schools is brutalize students.
Putting cops in schools was observed many years ago to result in suffering for students.
Employees of the Injustice Department asked for search warrants to demand the lists of people who watched political protest videos. When the judge refused, they argued he should conceal the fact that they had asked for the warrants. The judge denied that too.
The US since January 2025 has *deported 21,000 [people] to places US calls too dangerous to visit.*
Britain is headed for a food shortage caused by extreme weather, which itself is caused by global heating. That implies such shortages are likely to get worse and worse.
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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