The photo comes from wikimedia.org
"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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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 on your senators to reject the corrupter's nominees for the USPS board.
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 local governments to cancel their Flock contracts.
US citizens: call on Congress to stop big tech's Data Center Land Grab
It is unfortunate that the petition grants these data centers the usually unmerited accolade of "artificial intelligence". I myself never do that.
However, I signed the petition anyway.
US citizens: call on media to cover Flock's policy changes with skepticism.
US citizens: call on the Senate to stop Pentagon contractors' stock buybacks, and make them get the Pentagon's permission to release a dividend.
Clearly it would be better if paying a dividend required permission from some organization more likely to be strict, but this rule is a step forward anyway. And so is the stock buyback rule.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: Defend Bristol Bay (in Alaska) from political pressure from a mining company that wants to pollute it.
US citizens: Submit a public comment to oppose the plan to undermine the Head Start educational program.
Here is the comment I submitted:
I strongly oppose the proposed rule, “Reducing Federal Burden for Head Start Programs,” and urge HHS and ACF to withdraw it.
The fact that this proposed rule would eliminate so many standards all at once shows that its true goal is to undermine Head Start, rather than to make it work better or more efficiently.
Head Start should be strengthened, not stripped of the standards that have been its backbone. To weaken these standards would open the door to weakening the education of American children, especially children in disprivileged groups and those struggling with poverty, housing instability, and difficulty obtaining documentation.
Please withdraw the proposed rule under docket ACF-2026-0595 and RIN 0970-AD30 and preserve strong nationwide Head Start Program Performance Standards.
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 ban the deportation thugs' electric shock gloves.
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 stop the saboteur in chief and RFK jr. from dismantling Head Start.
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: oppose the Democratic National Committee's ban on ranked choice voting in Democratic primaries.
US citizens: call for restoring funding for Public Media.
US citizens: Support the Green New Deal for Health. It is designed to protect Americans from the danger of increasing heat and local disasters, both short term and long term.
US citizens: call on your public officials to tax big oil's war profiteering.
Here's what I said in my letter:
I urge you to tax the war profits being collected by giant oil corporations and end their tax breaks. They have been draining America's bank account as they drain America's petroleum, and polluting our politics as they pollute our air and water. It's time to make them stop!
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 congresscritter to stop the racist immigration crackdown.
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 lawmakers to tax Big Tech's ad income.
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 Tell State Leaders: Protect Human-Centered Education Before Supposed Intelligence Enters Our Classrooms.
I edited my letter so as not to refer to these bullshit generators as "artificial intelligence", because I question whether they qualify as "intelligence". See https://gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#ArtificialIntelligence.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
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 Deform UK party's latest deformation plan would throw hundreds of thousands of children into destitution, and many disabled people too.
Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln say there is a grave shortage of food; some have lost 30 pounds. The water is not fit to drink.
Relatives excoriate the bullshitter for denying these facts, but that's simply being himself.
The case of journalist Carlitos Ricardo Parias: *A journalist was injured while documenting government power, shot during an attempt to arrest him, prosecuted, repeatedly denied medical care — and then left in immigration detention, where he has continued documenting the conditions around him.*
The wrecker's tax big cuts were not just for billionaires. They also gave a handout to multimillionaires. As usual, at the expense of everyone else in the US.
Government secret agents have been persistently investigating the Sunrise Movement. They keep getting more and more evidence that it is committed to nonviolence (including nonviolent civil disobedience), but continue searching desperately for some violence in it somewhere.
The bully's attack against Iran was a moral error and a grand-strategic mistake. In addition, it was a strategic military mistake which has caused the US to lose much of its power in the world.
Is that a bad thing? No, and yes. The bully has been using US power for evil purposes; now he has less capacity to do that. However, the countries that have gained power though that mistake have been even more vicious, for decades.
Eissa Hashemi and Maryam Tahmasebi, a married couple of professors who were permanent residents in the US, are in deportation prison because Hashemi's mother, Masoumeh Ebtekar, is a supporter of the regime and participated in the occupation of the US embassy.
It is not impossible that they are somehow working with Ebtekar on a nefarious plot, but the persecutor's henchmen have not made such charges -- they have simply cancelled the family's residence permits arbitrarily and (according to Tahmasebi) aim to keep them in deportation prison for life.
Prisoners in an overcrowded deportation prison (privately run by CoreCivic) in Mississippi (far south in the US) were forced sometimes to spend hours outdoors in bright sun, and at other times, to swelter in crowded cells, because of a power outage.
The prison kommandant held the prisoners incommunicado during that period.
Privatized prisons are a motor for inaccountability, and therefore for cruelty and gratuitious suffering; this makes them inherently unjust. We should abolish them all.
Dictator Kim expressed his appreciation of the bully's gesture of friendship by firing 10 ballistic missiles.
Comparing would-be Dictator Donald with Dictator Kim.
*[The persecutor]'s spying on leftwing groups recalls J Edgar Hoover’s Cointelpro.
Other countries have deported millions of Afghans to Afghanistan. For Afghan women, that means deportation to slavery.
To deport someone to a place where she will be tortured violates the treaties which establish the right to asylum. Yet the EU is now trying to negotiate a deal with the Taliban for returning refugees there.
A Tory-run local council in London wants to shut down soup kitchens because the area around "is not safe".
The ambassador to Britain appointed by President Aung San Suu Kyi defied the military government's order to vacate the ambassadorial house in London. The UK is denying the moral doubts about the situation by prosecuting him for "trespassing" in a diplomatic residence.
* Israeli militants have besieged two Palestinian families in their homes since the weekend, aiming to take over their properties in the West Bank village of Qusra through a campaign of terror.*
A planned datacenter near the Everglades threatens to damage it with waste heat.
There is a bright side: as data centers boost the combustion of fossil fuels, they will speed the inundation of the data center along with the Everglades and South Florida. And the White House.
But I don't think that will make up for all the things that the world would lose as civilization falls.
(satire) *Melania Trump Discovered To Be Russian Listening Device.*
The UK is taking the terrible step of setting up permanent face recognition which will make streets unsafe for people that the state does not like.
*Potatoes "boil" in the ground as record heatwave sweeps across swathes of Asia.*
*The Intercept Sues [the corrupter] for Selling [early] Access to Truth Social Announcements.*
This seems to be a plan to profit privately by selling the opportunity to cheat on bets to "predict" what the corrupter has already decided to do.
"Prediction" betting invites corruption; I think we ought to prohibit it.
California has banned the pesticide paraquat, deciding no longer to treat ex-agricultural workers as pests.
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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