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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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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 state lawmakers to ban the deportation thugs from public school property.
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 Maine AG to hold VICE accountable for murder.
"VICE" stands for Violent Institution for Contemptuous Execution.
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 Vote NO on CORCA – the “Retail Crime” Bill that hands VICE power.
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 pass the No Troops at the Polls 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 NYT, CNN, WaPo to cover Prairieland prosecution as silencing dissent.
US citizens: State your solidarity with the United Auto Workers and its president, Shawn Fain, who is facing persecution by the bully for criticizing him.
US citizens: call on the Smithsonian Board of Regents to reject attempts by the bullshitter to influence the historical record of America.
US citizens: call on Congress to stop Trump from bullying states over elections.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to investigate the FBI raid on a voter registration drive.
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 McDonalds and other fast food giants to take responsibility for protecting their workers.
US citizens: call on the House of Representatives to vote to block 3.3 billion dollars in funds 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: Encourage states to sue to stop the Paramount-Warner Bros Merger.
US citizens: call on the SEC to maintain shareholders' power to vote on motions to control the actions of a business.
US citizens: call on Harris County DA Sean Teare to arrest the deportation thug that killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.
US citizens: call on Congress to Abolish Super PACs.
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: submit a public comment to protect Medicaid.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
US citizens: More than 4 million people have lost SNAP food aid since last summer. Tell your congresscritter and senators: don't farm legislation that leaves families behind.
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 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.
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.
Highly progressive former state legislator Troy Jackson will replace Platner as candidate for senator from Maine.
*How Europe's most powerful farming lobby killed EU's pesticide law.*
It lobbies against any kind of regulation that would reduce the profits of Big Ag, regardless of what problem the regulation would address.
The corrupter is trying to distract our attention from his attacks on the US election system using vague charges, based on inconclusive evidence, that China is doing such attacks.
Surveillance eyeglasses with built-in cameras and facial recognition are being pushed by Suckerberg.
The deportation thug who killed Joan Sebastián Durán has possibly been identified and that name is linked with reports of violence and threats.
This "directly call[s] into question the supposed vetting and training ICE does of its recruits."
Global heating can force shutdown of nuclear power plants. It has happened this month in France due to the heat wave.
To make the Labour Party a force for good, its new leader should return to the big missions it ran on two years ago -- and then dropped.
The persecutor's men arrested and jailed Wu Shaoping, a Chinese human rights lawyer who fled to the US in 2020 and asked for asylum.
Since then he has remained lawfully in the US waiting for a decision on his asylum request, until being arrested for no known reason. Will the persecutor deport Wu to China, where he will surely face imprisonment after a bogus trial?
It is a damned shame that such an asylum decision can take so many years, but that is a different issue.
The corrupter has ordered that foreign journalists living in the US ask for a visa renewal every 8 months.
That will be a real screw, because they won't be able to lease an apartment for just 8 months.
This seems to be a scheme to intimidate them into going soft on the corrupter's crimes, attacks on civil liberties, and harm to the non-rich.
An employee at a privatized deportation prison shot a protester outside the prison, and has been arrested and charged.
That employee is not a federal agent. I wonder how far the persecutor's henchmen will go to protect him.
US Republicompoops are calling for sanctions against Canada to punish it for the smoke blowing into parts of the US from large wildfires in western Ontario.
The specific proposal is absurd, of course, but there is some validity in the general idea. Uncontrollable fires are mainly the result of global heating, and global heating is the result of bad government policies that encourage more burning of fossil fuels. Sanctions could make governments change those policies.
Canada is one of the countries which has persistently encouraged fossil fuel exports, and continues to do this, so its deliberate actions are partly responsible for these fires (though not for precisely when and where they occur). Canada deserves sanctions to pressure it to stop doing causing more of them.
Of course, Canada is not the only country which does this. The US is a far worse culprit.
The EU, by contrast, has an effective emissions-reduction law, but businesses (and billionaires behind them) are demanding that the EU weaken it in the name of "competitiveness".
When parts of the world racing to a goal that implies destroying them all, saving civilization calls for inviting those billionaires to kill just themselves, rather than everyone.
Reading and writing train the brain to formulate thoughts and to think more clearly. The US has become much less literate in recent decades, and it shows in our election results. But those are just a couple of points in this article, which is well worth reading through.
Refuting the fallacious argument that rich Americans use to claim they are paying their fair share of income tax.
The new British prime minister, who people hoped would be less right-wing than Starmer, has rejected a wealth tax "for now".
If he won't dare now, what chance is there he will dare later? The "division" he would like to avoid is between the rich and their servants, and all the rest. That division will continue to grow as long as the share of income for the rich continues to grow.
*"Misuse" of crowd control weapons on [anti-deportation] protesters led to blindings and traumatic brain injuries, report finds. Doctors and human rights experts documented hundreds of incidents from June 2025 through May 2026 and estimate true number is "far greater".*
* The Worse Outlaw ["the corrupter] Becomes, The Less the Democrats Move to Initiate Impeachment.*
US citizens: call on your state lawmakers to ban the deportation thugs from public school property.
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 Maine AG to hold VICE accountable for murder.
"VICE" stands for Violent Institution for Contemptuous Execution.
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 Vote NO on CORCA – the “Retail Crime” Bill that hands VICE power.
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 pass the No Troops at the Polls 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.
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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