The photo comes from wikimedia.org
"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
The photo comes from
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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
the Free Software Foundation or
the GNU Project.
For the sake of separation, this site has always been
hosted elsewhere and managed separately.
It is more likely I can actually go if you have funds to cover the additional cost, and a speaker's fee would be nice.
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
I will have a trip to Europe in the second week of October and I am looking for invitations for additional talks in the same trip. If you would like to invite me to speak in that trip, please write to me at rms-invitation@gnu.org with "october" as the subject.
It is more likely I can actually go if you have funds to cover the additional cost, and a speaker's fee would be nice.
US citizens: call on the IRS to keep churches and state separate.
US citizens: call on Congress to investigate links between CBS's ransom for spurious threats and the approval of the CBS-Paramount merger by the weaponized FCC.
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
Everyone: call on CBS not to cancel Colbert.
US citizens: call for environmental reviews of the muskrat's rocket launches. Rocket fuel and its combustion products can do a lot of damage to the environment.
US citizens: call on Secretary Burgum of the US Forest Service to hire people now to fully staff the agency so that it can put out fires sooner and save Americans' homes. He must not heed the arsonist in chief.
Of course, in the long term, our response to the increasing danger of wildfires is to stop them before they happen. Curb greenhouse gas emissions; build renewable generators and large batteries. But that is mostly outside the mission of the Forest Service.
Here's how to make the actionnetwork.org letter campaign linked above work without running the site's nonfree JavaScript code. (See https://gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html for why that issue matters.)
First, make sure you have deactivated JavaScrupt in your browser or are using the LibreJS plug-in.
I have done the next step for you: I added `?nowrapper=true' to the end of the campaign URL before posting it above. That should bring you to a page that starts with, "Letter campaigns will not work without JavaScript!"
They indeed won't work without some manual help, but the following simple method seems adequate for many of them, including this one.
To start, fill in the personal information answers in the box on the right side of the page. That's how you say who's sending the letter.
Then click the "START WRITING" button. That will take you to a page that can't function without nonfree JavaScript code. (To ensure it doesn't function perversely by running that nonfree code, you can enable LibreJS or disable JavaScript by visiting that page.) You can finish sending without that code By editing its URL in the browser's address bar, as follows:
First, go to the end and insert `&nowrapper=true'. Then tell the browser to visit that URL. This should give you a version of the page that works without JavaScript. Edit the subject and body of your letter. Finally, click on the "SEND LETTER" button, and you're done.
This method seems to work for letter campaigns that send the letters to a fixed list of recipients, the same recipients for every sender. Editing and revisiting the URL is the only additional step needed to bypass the nonfree JavaScript code. I'm sure you'll agree it is a small effort for the result of supporting the campaign without opening your computer to unjust (and potentially malicious) software.
US citizens: call on the Navy Federal Credit Union to pay back what it stole from navy servicemen through illegal fees, even though the now-corrupted CFPB said it didn't have to do that.
Here's how to make the actionnetwork.org letter campaign linked above work without running the site's nonfree JavaScript code. (See https://gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html for why that issue matters.)
First, make sure you have deactivated JavaScrupt in your browser or are using the LibreJS plug-in.
I have done the next step for you: I added `?nowrapper=true' to the end of the campaign URL before posting it above. That should bring you to a page that starts with, "Letter campaigns will not work without JavaScript!"
They indeed won't work without some manual help, but the following simple method seems adequate for many of them, including this one.
To start, fill in the personal information answers in the box on the right side of the page. That's how you say who's sending the letter.
Then click the "START WRITING" button. That will take you to a page that can't function without nonfree JavaScript code. (To ensure it doesn't function perversely by running that nonfree code, you can enable LibreJS or disable JavaScript by visiting that page.) You can finish sending without that code By editing its URL in the browser's address bar, as follows:
First, go to the end and insert `&nowrapper=true'. Then tell the browser to visit that URL. This should give you a version of the page that works without JavaScript. Edit the subject and body of your letter. Finally, click on the "SEND LETTER" button, and you're done.
This method seems to work for letter campaigns that send the letters to a fixed list of recipients, the same recipients for every sender. Editing and revisiting the URL is the only additional step needed to bypass the nonfree JavaScript code. I'm sure you'll agree it is a small effort for the result of supporting the campaign without opening your computer to unjust (and potentially malicious) software.
US citizens: call on the deportation thugs to resume holding bond hearings for people they arrest, as they used to.
US citizens: phone your Congresscritter at 844-994-4554 and urge her to sign the discharge petition so the House can vote on the Protect America's Workforce Act.
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.
The saboteur in chief has proposed a plan to promote artificial stupidity (AS) which would take water supplies away from many Americans, poison the air for millions, and speed global heating. No one would support it except for the marketing hype of calling it "artificial intelligence". What a shame that all the articles that criticize it endorse the hype.
If enough of us react that marketing hype term, we can change this.
*Agence France-Presse (AFP), the Associated Press, BBC News and Reuters said they were “desperately concerned” about the journalists in Gaza after widespread warnings of mass starvation.*
They should broadcast and publish this point regularly in their most visible journalism.
Israel has jailed 28 Gaza doctors. along with hundreds of other medical workers. Most of the doctors have been in jail for over a year, and none have specific charges that purport to justify jailing them.
No imaginable actual conditions could justify such actions.
Many of the prisoners in Israeli jails are tortured.
Some are broken when they emerge.
*Israel's food points are not just death traps – they're an alibi for the starvation of Gaza*
That's what "humanitarian" means nowadays for the persecutor and Netanyahu.
The report of the deportation of Luis Leon was reportedly a hoax.
Here's an incomplete list of the personal data that the DOSE knows about most persons in the US.
Palantir may now have all of this data too.
UK thugs arrested a protester and accused him of "terrorism" for holding up a copy of a cartoon from a satirical magazine that mocks the arrest of protesters as "terrorists" if they support the banned so-called "terrorist" organization, Palestine Action.
Even in regard to a real terrorist organization, this extremist enforcement of a ban on supporting it would be absurd, and dangerous. Indeed, it is as dangerous as terrorism itself.
Plastics companies (which include the big oil companies) filled global plastics treaty negotiations with their agents, and bullied those who were there to support an effective treaty.
*Eswatini opposition attacks US [deportation] deal as "human trafficking disguised as deportation".*
I think that metaphor is the wrong one. In human trafficking, usually the people being trafficked are desperate to go, and are taken advantage of on the way. What Eswatini, Sudan and El Salvador have done is more like operating a private prison business.
Senator Murkowski made an informal deal with the bullshitter, and now complains that he has already broken it.
The deal was that he would spare renewable electricity projects in Maine from the planned cuts specified in the Big Bad Bill. Somehow the senator imagined that preserving renewable energy solely in her state was enough to excuse her voting for the bill. Even more foolish, she imagined that he would keep a verbal deal even though it was not stated explicitly in the bill.
If you have not made provision for suing him if he breaks a deal, you ought to know he will break it.
The boarding schools that taught well-off British families' children were crushingly cruel and a large fraction of students were traumatized.
The Harvard Educational Review planned a special issue about education in Palestine, but it was arbitrarily canceled shortly before it was supposed to be published.
The details of this act of censorship were complex, but it clearly comes down to a political assault on academic freedom.
The news that Harvard has adopted the unsuitable IHRA criterion for antisemitism is sad.
The UK government is thinking of weakening banking regulations that are crucial to prevent banks from making the foolhardy bets that can cause a crash.
The UK is considering using artificial intelligence to determine refugees' ages from their photos.
I presume that what they have in mind is true artificial intelligence, not bullshit generators such as ChatGPT. These machine learning systems can be quite accurate, but quite accurate does not mean inerrant. Even with a system that is highly accurate, there will be some errors. The question is, what are the consequences of an error?
North Korea's participation in the Putin forces is, in effect, practice for another Korean war.
(satire) *Study Finds Plants Increasingly Reliant On Gig Workers For Pollination.*
New Zealand has adopted a law that insists on the absurdity that a river is a "living whole" and "indivisible". Of course, a river normally contains living organisms of various kinds, that interact as ecosystems. That is not the same thing as what the law says.
The aim of this law is to protect the river's ecosystems. I support that goal. But legislating a false equation is irrational-ism, in effect establishing a sort of animist religion. and sure to lead to avoidable harm, one way or another.
Some day we may be able to communicate with river dolphins, and ask one, "Are you part of a single indivisible life-form that contains also that fish over there?" It might answer, "That will be so after I finish digesting it."
Keeping our grip on reality is fundamentally importance. We would write legislate to protect rivers from damage from humans' actions in ways that resist establishing an irrationalist religion.
*UK watchdog investigates eight years of Deloitte audits of mining firm Glencore.* There is a suspicion that Deloitte may have subtly collaborated with some sort of corruption.
I have no knowledge of the facts about this, but it would not surprise me if the large accounting companies have slid into making their accounting less neutral.
*A fifth of California homes are investor-owned as state’s affordability crisis deepens.*
The obvious approach to correcting this is to increase taxes on houses owned by large investment companies.
*Israel and the [persecutor] are carrying out their final solution in Gaza.*
The author asserts that the frequent shooting of unarmed Palestinians being forced to run to secure a box of food is not only an expression of hatred, but part of a policy to make the Palestinians of Gaza desperate enough that they will accept any offer of refuge, anywhere in the world. Supposing Netanyahu and the persecutor can create a facsimile of one.
What it's like to make the harrowing journey to a Gaza "Humanitarian" Foundation aid site, while ducking "humanitarian" bullets fired by "humanitarian" rifles wielded by "humanitarian" mercenary sharpshooters.
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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