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"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
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"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
Richard will give a talk in Ben, Switzerland on June 12 titled Freie/Libre/Libero/Liber Software, for Sovereignty and Freedom.
We suggest you bring cash.
Richard Stallman will speak in Erlangen, Germany on June 16 at 16:00, at the School of Engineering of FAU.
The talk is on the moral issues of free vs nonfree software.
We suggest you bring cash.
US citizens: make phone calls to your officials in Congress to reject massive government surveillance.
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 renew section 702 of the PAT RIOT Act without the loophole that permits snooping on Americans.
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 Department of Labor to Stop Private Equity and Crypto Scammers from Gambling with Workers' Retirement Savings.
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 and senators to investigate Kash Patel's flagrant misuse of taxpayer funds.
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 restore funding for Social Security offices.
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 reject magat recommendations to undermine FEMA.
Global heating is increasing the amount of damage done by disasters, so FEMA needs to be strengthened and better funded. This in addition to strong efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions to make global heating taper off.
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 refuse to fund implementation of the bully's plan that could label millions of Americans as "domestic terrorists".
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 reject the wrecker's attacks on housing and homeless assistance programs.
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 on major news organizations to cover the wrecker's foreign aid cuts with urgency and moral clarity.
US citizens: support the cops who fought the coup-leader's Jan 6 riot at the Capitol, as they sue him to block his self-settlement meant to give him lots of money to give the rioters as "compensation" for the punishment of their crimes.
US citizens: call on news organizations to cover the persecutor's attacks on the media as threats to press freedom.
US citizens: call on Congress to block the Paramount - Warner Bros merger.
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.
US citizens: make phone calls to your officials in Congress to reject massive government surveillance.
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 renew section 702 of the PAT RIOT Act without the loophole that permits snooping on Americans.
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 Department of Labor to Stop Private Equity and Crypto Scammers from Gambling with Workers' Retirement Savings.
See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.
Erdoğan's government has just removed the head of the main opposition party, Özgür Özel, by invalidating the party's leadership contest held over two years ago.
Its previous leader, who now becomes leader again, lost an election to Erdoğan in 2023. People hoped Özel would defeat Erdoğan next year.
*The corrupter has created a slush fund of taxpayer money to give to his friends.*
George Zimmerman may have escaped conviction for shooting Trayvon Martin because an important witness for the prosecution spoke with a strong accent of her ethnic group. I wonder whether courts ought to offer accent interpreters for witnesses whose accents might lead jurors to misunderstand or devalue their testimony, or simply make it a struggle to know what the witness said.
The US has indicted Raúl Castro, ex-president of Cuba, accusing him of ordering an attack on two small planes in 1996.
According to Wikipedia, the planes were dropping leaflets "to fall on Cuba". There is some slack in the precise meaning of that, but maybe Cuba had legitimate grounds to order them to land and then force them to do so.
However, Cuba had no legitimate grounds to shoot and destroy these unarmed planes without first ordering them to land. By doing that, it committed a crime similar to the boat attacks that the bully continually orders elsewhere in the Gulf of Mexico.
The US ought to indict the people responsible for the continuing series of boat attacks, who are Americans, if it is to indict the people responsible for Cuba's airplane attack 30 years ago.
Cops who defended the Capitol against the anti-American's Jan 6 attack are suing, claiming that the anti-American's slush fund is corrupt support for crime.
NATO and the EU accuse the Putin forces of redirecting Ukrainian drones and sending them over Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
I don't see any sense in the resignation of Latvia's prime minister over this. The right thing to do is to develop a net deployer which can get a drone tangled and bring it down. (Ukraine's army has had success defending against Putin forces drones with used fishnets.)
This might make it possible to study what the Putin forces had done to take control of the drone. Suitable encryption, with redundancy and error detection, could make that impossible. It is much more difficult than mere jamming.
Ecuador has suffered from a repressive "war on drugs" since 2024, with soldiers kidnapping, torturing, and killing people, and showing no reasons for any of it.
Muslims (and Muslim charities) are often debanked based on vague suspicions — because banks have been told to deny banking service to terrorists, but they have no valid way to identify the few who really are terrorists.
*US judge dismisses criminal indictment against Kilmar Ábrego García,* saying that the prosecution was politically based.
Many of the activists seized on the latest Gaza aid flotilla suffered violent attacks after the Israeli troops captured them. They began the violence on the aid boats, after seizing them, and continued it afterward against the captives in prison.
They shot some captives with less-lethal bullets (these are usually rubber-coated steel) from a short distance. Sometimes this broke their bones.
Cops raped some of the protesters.
These attacks caused injuries that have been confirmed by doctors from the victims' home countries; nonetheless, the Israeli government denies them, thus arrogantly legitimizing these attacks while expressing brazen contempt for the truth.
Prosecutors in some countries are investigating criminal charges over these attacks.
Indigenous rights activists in Russia face harsh repression.
As in Canada and the US, indigenous groups find mining and extraction put their health in danger, and they try to resist.
Minister of "security" Ben-Gvir spread abuse of Palestinians in Israel's prison system. This has been covered occasionally.
Now he has trained similar abuse on foreign activists, and some countries are rebuking Israel for this. But the foreign activists are, in themselves, a secondary issue: they are campaigning to end Israel's deprivation and violence against Palestinians under occupation.
Ben-Gvir is trying to create a buffer zone around the cruelty to Palestinians, a buffer zone of cruelty to foreigners who defend the human rights of Palestinians. But it may backfire and make more of the world see the cruelty towards Palestinians more clearly.
Global heating marches steadily on, with a possible record marine heat-wave on the US Pacific coast, along with a record low amount of snow in the Rocky Mountains. This occurring with water already in shortage could result in a painful scarcity of water in a large part of the US west.
If it doesn't happen this year, it will happen in another year. There are random fluctuations in the details, but the big picture is that the heat is producing global disaster.
Major anti-social media platforms have blocked access to the accounts of some exiled dissidents from Salafi Arabia so that they can't be seen inside Salafi Arabia.
Australians on the Gaza aid flotilla describe many kinds of torture that were inflicted on them by the anonymous, masked Israeli soldiers and prison guards.
US citizens: call on your congresscritter and senators to investigate Kash Patel's flagrant misuse of taxpayer funds.
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 restore funding for Social Security offices.
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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Richard Stallman
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