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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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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 congresscritter and senators to reject the "Great American AI Act" and the propaganda terminology that appears in its name.
In my letter I explained that "AI" is a marketing hype term that the big tech companies use to make the public yield, and urged the legislators to reject it. I included the URL
https://gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#ArtificialIntelligance
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 media outlets to cease climate hushing.
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 the US Postal Service to continue delivering mail to anyone and everyone — to reject the plan to control whom states can mail ballots to.
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 tax the pretend-intelligence hype industry.
In my letter, I denounced the hype term "artificial intelligence" and called for the taxes to be high enough to make human-based customer service, which is superior, competitive again. I deleted the paragraphs that presumed "AI" was a good thing.
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 oppose the BUILD America 250 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 the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine to defend climate science from political interference and industry pressure.
US citizens: call on the US Postal Service to continue delivering to anyone.
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 make billionaires and trillionaires pay their fair share.
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 Senate to reject Jay Clayton as director of national intelligence. He is loyal to the corrupter rather than to the country he ought to serve, and that makes him unfit.
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 bully's threat-backed demand for the complete voting list of each state.
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.
* Unicef analyzed young people's exposure to eight climate hazards: coastal floods, droughts, extreme heat, fires, heatwaves, river floods, sand and dust storms, and tropical storms… Almost every child, including those from high-income countries, is now exposed to at least one hazard.*
Governor Newsom accuses the US government of investigating him and his wife hoping to find something to smear him with, because he plans to run for president in 2028.
I do not support Newsom, because he is a plutocratist "moderate" democrat , one who does not seek to do anything about the problem of super-rich people who endanger democracy and human rights.
(satire) *[Major League Baseball] Demands Return Of All Foul Balls.*
Shipments of products made in Israel's colonies in the West Bank are systematically mislabeled as "Made in Israel" to take fraudulent advantage of trade preferences for exports of Israel's products.
Iranian repression police made a practice of shooting protesters in the face, chest or genitals. Often this caused grave injuries, or death.
Due to our greenhouse gas emissions, chikungunya can now spread in most of Europe.
Many "tropical" diseases are, or will be in a few decades, able to spread in the formerly temperate zones.
* The Guardian geolocated and verified images showing the Israeli military using excavators made by six companies – Caterpillar, Volvo, Hyundai, Doosan, Hitachi and Komatsu – to destroy homes, public utilities, shops and other structures across southern Lebanon.*
*Sudden shifts from wet to dry weather, or vice versa, may foil typical drought and flooding prevention measures.*
The wrecker is going all-out to increase the use of fossil fuels, but is not convincing the American public that that is safe.
*Two-thirds of Americans say they are worried about climate but level of media coverage does not reflect this.*
I don't think the wrecker cares about the danger of global climate disaster, only about rewarding the planet roasters to keep them in his corner. They all deserve to end up broke and experience living on however much support the US provides to the poor.
The muskrat's fabulous cars-in-tunnels "mass transit" seems to be unable to serve many people, but it is an opportunity to disregard environmental planning regulations with impunity and serve real estate owners rather than the public.
The corrupter has found another bureaucratic path to reward the people who attacked the capitol on 6 Jan 2020.
It seems the corrupter has decided to cut his losses in the gratuitous (and unwinnable) war with Iran. For once he has approached a situation in a way that does his country a little good, though it is far less than the harm he has done in relations with Iran over the past year. Meanwhile, he found no way to fix the problem that he gratuitously created when he cancelled Obama's non-nuclear deal with Iran.
He will salvage something from this idiocy, though -- some way to increase profits for some of his billionaire supporters.
* Decriminalizing the possession of cannabis or strictly regulating access to the drug do not appear to drive up usage, but when the drug is sold commercially the number of users increases and more mental health problems are seen, a review has found.*
Evanston, Illinois, passed a law to compensate former black residents whose ancestors lived in Evanston and experienced the systemic housing discrimination.
I know of three ways n which where the US government and its sub-jurisdictions denied blacks equal rights under the law: slavery, Jim Crow segregation (in some states), and discrimination in housing assistance in part of the 20th century. These were direct policies of discrimination carried out by governments, and those governments are liable for injustice of these racist laws.
Since such harm tends to be inherited by successive generations of descendants of the victims, it is right and proper for the governments that committed those wrongs to pay compensation to today's Americans whose ancestors were wronged.
I can't tell from the article precisely what the conditions are for receiving compensation in Evanston. If they are formulated as being on account of a person's race, that may be discriminatory and unjust. But if they are formulated as being on account of past discrimination against a person's ancestors (done because of their race), that is not discrimination today. The discrimination in question was the racism of the past, and compensation has to compensate the descendants of those selected as victims of racism.
The first article linked to, above, 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 because I consider them important — and I present this comment about them.
A British appeals court sustained the arbitrary criminalization of stating support for Palestine Action.
A few more levels of appeal are possible, but Stormer's government is dead set on repression of criticism where it counts.
"Expensive electricity is killing British industry" — but subsidizing energy made from fossil fuels is killing civilization.
The UK government should look for a way to subsidize the customers for energy, but not subsidize fossil fuel or electricity made from that. We must maintain the incentive to use less fossil fuel. There are other ways to keep industrial production going.
The bullshitter has acknowledged important points, such as that Israel wages war in ways that gratuitously kill civilians, and that Netanyahu's wars are unjust and bad for US interests.
Does this mean the bullshitter has had a change of heart? I doubt it; he has gone so long without a heart that he surely doesn't have one now. I think he is simply applying to Israel and Netanyahu the approach he has used with so many others: to contradict himself frequently and change positions so fast that negotiators accustomed to serious negotiations can't grasp what is happening.
I am not sure this will confuse Netanyahu, though. He seems to practice a similar approach.
Iran now demands that Israel withdraw its army from Lebanon or there will be no peace deal.
Maybe the new maximum leader believes he dominates the wrecker so much that he can demand anything whatsoever and get it. Or maybe he is bluffing.
With so much readiness to bluff, it will be hard for them to reach an agreement even if there is an agreement to be reached.
Explaining how surveillance companies recruit schools, classes and teachers to pressure students and their parents into giving their personal data to the companies, and allowing those companies to track the students and parents.
I suspect that refusing to run anything from Google Prey Store or the Crapple Crap Store will keep them from tracking you. But protecting students in school calls for a law prohibiting schools from ever asking students to run nonfree programs or hosting activities that do so.
California has accused AT&T of lying to the FCC to get permission to eliminate old copper land lines in California.
Alas, the corrupter encourages the FCC to accept lies from big companies that do things to please him.
Turkish journalist Ece Temelkuran writes about how cruel tyranny engulfed Turkey, in the process of which threats of violence forced her into exile. And about what it is like to lose your country to that political disease.
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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