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 Congress to block $3.3 billion in taxpayer funding for Israel's military.
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 news media to recognize that the persecutor's henchmen are drumming up false accusations of tolerating fraud as an excuse to deny Medicaid funds to Democratic states.
US citizens: call on RFK Jr. to stop sabotaging Lyme disease prevention.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
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 big banks not to harass non-citizens for the bully.
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 state attorney general to sue to block the persecutor's new Medicaid Work Requirements.
If they go into effect, the complex paperwork would be an insuperable burden for many of the handicaped veterans, who would need to satisfy and convince bureaucrats whose mission is to resist.
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.
Call on Congress to pass the Empowering App-Based Workers Act.
What is missing in that bill, in my view, is
The deportation thugs decided to cease the practice of ordering drivers to pull over, since that has shown a tendency to lead to killings of drivers.
However, the persecutor ordered them to resume. Apparently he thinks that killing people for no reason is a good thing.
Why would he think so? I theorize that he hopes to intimidate Americans into despair by showing contempt for the harm he does. And train his followers into similar Nazi-style contempt.
US sanctions against UN official [Francesca Albanese] and [Palestinian human] rights groups violate first amendment, lawsuit claims.
The US has demanded Spain extradite James ‘Fergie’ Chambers, accused of "supporting HAMAS", but people suspect that what he really did was support humanitarian projects in Gaza, which the US government has invented an excuse to mislabel as "supporting HAMAS".
*Gaza flotilla activist tells of rape in Israeli detention. Anna Liedtke files criminal complaint in Israel over alleged attack by female guards and says abuse was intended to silence campaigners.*
(satire) *Study Finds Gen Z Telepaths Lack Attention Span To Read Even Single Mind.*
US citizens: call on Congress to block $3.3 billion in taxpayer funding for Israel's military.
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 news media to recognize that the persecutor's henchmen are drumming up false accusations of tolerating fraud as an excuse to deny Medicaid funds to Democratic states.
US citizens: call on RFK Jr. to stop sabotaging Lyme disease prevention.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
A photo of a Palestinian prisoner being tortured in an Israeli prison confirms that the frequent accusations of torture reflect reality.
The victim's mother says she recognizes him from the photo, but it seems she has had no word about him since he was grabbed in 2023.
The Tory government of the UK was convinced to decide to spend over 250 billion pounds on new fossil fuel generators, justifying this based on the claim that they will emit somewhat less greenhouse gas pollution than already existing fossil fuel generators.
That is a very stupid justification, given that it would be cheaper to build renewable generators as replacements, and eliminate all of their greenhouse gas emissions.
Reduced physical activity due to global heating will lead to rise in health issues, study says.
Researchers project that reduced activity could contribute to half a million additional premature deaths annually by 2050.
Rep. Ro Khanna visited the West Bank recently. He and group were held at gunpoint by a group of violent extremist "settlers" and soldiers.
Robert Reich: [The cheater] will Try to Steal the Midterms. Here's How And How We Prevent Him from Doing So.
The bully has Marco Rubio trying to destroy the International Criminal Court because it might someday perhaps prosecute the who carry out war crimes for him. Or maybe even the bully himself.
Civil society organizations can be authoritarian -- in political leanings, in structure, and both at once.
Gangs in Haiti kidnap children to conscript them as killers.
The persecutor is trying to redirect Title X funding away from birth control and into pressuring women to have babies.
The persecutor's policies also include cutting all sorts of assistance to the poor for raising healthy children. It seems to be a plan for raising a new generation of miserable, twisted and hateful people.
Put this together with his evident efforts to accelerate global heating and keep civilization as vulnerable as possible, they add up to a plan to crush civilization from two sides at once.
The FCC is considering putting an end to "burner phones", requiring everyone with a portable phone to be identified.
The motive is to crack down on robocalls, something I consider desirable. However, the article explains that it is possible to do that without eliminating the possibility of anonymity.
If you want the burner phone not to be identified, you need to keep it powered off and shielded from radio waves, aside from special occasions. Otherwise, your identity might be deduced by patterns in location data or calling.
Every phone uses nonfree software to operate the radio communication, so I will still refuse to use them.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
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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