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"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
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This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman.
The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of
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the GNU Project.
For the sake of separation, this site has always been
hosted elsewhere and managed separately.
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
![[America Means Civil Liberties / Patriotism Means Protecting
Them / www.aclu.org/safefree ]](flag_set_vectorized.png)
US citizens: call on banks to stop fueling destruction of the Amazon forest.
Everyone: call on the directors of 23 and Me to protect the privacy of their customers.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and say, "Hold town-hall meetings with the public, in your district and maybe in other districts too."
When Democrats do this, it wins support. But when Republicans do this, it exposes what they really are.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators at (202) 224-3121 and call on them to save Social Security, by rehiring the staff that the DOSE(*) got rid of and reversing all other recent changes made by the bully and the muskrat.
* Depredations of Swinging Evisceration.
US citizens: call on Amazon to drop its lawsuit attacking the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Also, don't buy from Amazon. Yes, you can do it!
US citizens: Call for breaking up Big Medicine.
US citizens: call on Congress to resist the saboteur-in-chief firmly — don't look for a compromise.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on Congress not to allow the DOSE to wipe out post office staff.
DOSE stands for Department of Sabotage and Evisceration.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: call on Congress to stop the muskrat from replacing the rural broadband access with Starlink.
US citizens: call on states not to require ID checks to access any web sites.
You can find your state governor phone number at USA.gov. If you phone, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to block $8 billion in weapons for Israel.
US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support these bills designed to prevent Republicans from wrecking the Social Security Administration.
If that happens, I suggest Congress also legislate to require rehiring of all the fired SSA workers who are willing to return.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: phone your senators and call on them to reject the saboteur's nominee for Social Security commissioner (Bisignano), and insist on a commissioner who is loyal to the Social Security system and the Americans who do or may depend on it. Fire the muskrat!
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
US citizens: phone your congresscritter at (888) 853-7037 and urge per to oppose any cuts to Medicaid.
US citizens: call on the bully to insist that Israel allow humanitarian aid to reach the people of Gaza.
If you phone, please spread the word! White House: +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213
US citizens: Demand the immediate release of Mahmoud Khalil.
(I reject the emotionless word "custody" to describe being in jail.)
US citizens: call for the immediate release of Mahmoud Khalil a nonviolent protester who demonstrated against Israel's bombardment and siege of Gaza. He has not been charged with a crime, but the bully wants to cancel his green card and expel him from the US without showing any grounds for that.
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.
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.
It is exciting that SB 976 turns towards restricting recommendation algorithms. But these options should not be limited to minors — every user should have this choice. (Please do not refer to teenagers as "children"; that feeds the US tendency to treat them like children and retard their development.)
However, I suggest taking a step beyond just choosing to use or not use the platform's addiction system. Recommendation algorithms should be completely separated from platforms!
If you want to use a nontrivial recommendation algorithm, you should be able to choose it yourself and use it anonymously. You could send it the URLs you want it to base its choices on. These might be some of the pages you had visited, and perhaps pages you had not visited.
Then it should send you its recommendations. You could pass all, or just some, or none of those recommendations to the platform to look at them.
AB 1949 is admirable because it gives a small boost to privacy for users of all ages, not only for children. It isn't enough, though — users should also be guaranteed the right and possibility to access through the Tor network and to use aliases. And collection of a user's data by the state should require a warrant against the user.
Here are some quotations that I particularly like.
You can now read the political notes on Mastodon.
*Trump administration at "war" with mRNA technology: scientists alarmed vaccine skeptics could kill research.*
mRNA vaccines are the target of persistent disinformation along many fronts. Some disinformation exaggerates the significance of side effects that happen a small fraction of the time and generally cause no permanent harm. Others harp on thousands of people go had serious side effects but neglect to compare those with the millions of lives the vaccines saved.
US citizens: call on banks to stop fueling destruction of the Amazon forest.
*Despite the diversity of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, [deportation thugs] go after non-white visa and scholarship holders "to create a wedge in solidarity".*
Universities that hope to survive through eager submission to state repression will find themselves reduced to even more abject subservience,
The saboteur tried to seize personal control over who is allowed to vote in the US.
It follows the latest magat fashion of using a small federal power for leverage to bully lesser governments and institutions into repression: in this case, into requiring voters to show ID cards. The range of ID cards to be accepted would be so limited that many poor voters would do without them, and be disenfranchised.
Greg Palast estimates that 21 million eligible voters would be barred from voting, if states obey this.
It would also take the US another bit step towards having a national ID card — which is, itself, oppression.
* EPA sets up email address where "regulated community" can request exemption to evade air pollution rules.*
This is to speed the billionaires' ultimate sabotage project — to make the survival of civilization outside their realms impossible.
Two faculty of Harvard's Middle Eastern Studies department have suddenly "departed", and it is reported that they were fired except that the university doesn't want to admit that.
The Social Security Administration has 60 million lines of COBOL code and has long planned to migrate that very slowly and carefully into a more modern programming language. It would take years. But now the wrecking crew (LOGE, *) wants to do it in a few months.
It will surely have many new bugs. But instead of having humans do it, they plan to use bullshit generators to write the new code.
That will guarantee plenty of absurd mistakes that humans wouldn't make.
What could make the situation worse than that? The SSA could stop answering the phones, and eliminate most of the human beings to complain to.
Hmm, that's what they just did. Looks like someone is planning to make the Social Security system fail disastrously.
* LOGE = Lots of Grief, Evisceration
Amazon "echo" devices should be called "tattle" because they tell Amazon what they hear.
The magats rebuke the Smithsonian Institution for presenting modern scientists' and scholars' ideas of science and history, instead of the old-fashioned superstitions and prejudices they replaced.
US citizens: call on Amazon to drop its lawsuit attacking the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Also, don't buy from Amazon. Yes, you can do it!
Everyone: call on the directors of 23 and Me to protect the privacy of their customers.
The deportation thugs seems to have got search warrants for student rooms at Columbia University by misleading a judge, as well as misrepresenting the law they were claiming to enforce.
The wrecker is attacking law firms with executive orders to cut off their business. Three of them have taken legal action against these orders.
The wrecker tried to appoint a serious medical researcher as head of the CDC. He, and she, now face right-wing extremist disinformation.
I expect he will try to develop a system by which to control more completely which kinds of disinformation are permitted.
Alvaro Bedoya, FTC commissioner until he was fired by the corrupter, warns of apparent "quid pro quo" deals between the US government and billionaires. In other words, apparent corruption.
When the "Department of Justice" is part of the same corruption, there is no way to tackle it.
Parents following RFK's medical misinformation are giving their children cod-liver oil, thinking that will cure or prevent measles. It does nothing against measles, but it does cause liver damage.
European universities are starting to rescue threatened scientists from US universities.
Turks are holding very large rallies for jailed opposition leader İmamoğlu.
Florida's law forbidding hiring teachers who are officially residents of China (or some other countries) makes no exception for Chinese refugees who are applying for asylum.
I wonder whether this law violates federal anti-discrimination law.
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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