1. FBI agents murdered Ibragim Todashev during an interrogation last year. The interrogation was supposedly related to the Boston Marathon bombing (Todashev knew one of the alleged bombers while he was living in Boston.) But he was not accused of any crime. 2. The story doesn’t mention it, but the FBI specifically and repeatedly deported Todashev’s friends if they talked to the press about him or the FBI’s questioning of him.* 3. Today in the New York Times, the story is: FBI investigates FBI, clears FBI of all wrongdoing. 4. Anyone within the FBI who tells a reporter anything about this case is under threat of being stripped of their security clearance. #SeemsLegit http://ift.tt/1nPdcGu Abolish the FBI.

O.K., so, briefly, if you think that the point of Zeno’s Paradoxes of motion is to prove that the arrow never reaches its target, or that Achilles never passes the tortoise, &c. (*) then I think you’re mistaken about the point of raising the paradox in the first place. Of course, it’s hard to be confident about the motives of dead philosophers with no surviving books. But Zeno was a student of Parmenides and Plato tells us that his books were written to defend Parmenides’s doctrines, by showing that the views of his opponents led to contradictions. So the most charitable understanding of Zeno’s aims is not that he’s trying to show you that Achilles never passes the tortoise. Of course he does; just watch them race and you’ll see it happen. His point is to ask, *given* that Achilles passes the tortoise, how is that possible? And to argue (for good or for ill) that you can only make sense of Achilles passing the tortoise by rejecting presentism and accepting Parmenidean / eternalist conclusions about the nature of time and being. (* See, for example, the fairly standard attempt to work out the “answer” to the paradoxes here: http://ift.tt/1fGQhIW )

Via Tennyson McCalla “Wait,” you say, “Haven’t the complete works of Shakespeare been available on the MIT website for over 20 years now?” Yup. But this edition is better; the ridiculous legalities of copyright forced MIT to use a late Victorian edition and stonewalled for decades any attempt at catching up on the last 100+ years of textual scholarship on an author who has been dead for almost 400 years. Fortunately, under competitive pressure, Folger Shakespeare Library is actually doing something to get around the massive damage that copyright has done to the progress of science and the useful arts.

ALL/Center for a Stateless Society @ the BA(A)BF to-day at The Crucible.

Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison and Richard Burton, in Cleopatra (1963).

ICE vs. Caring Family, Responsibility, Compassion and Human Decency. #BordersAreStupid #Not1More #NiUnaMas

#Not1More #NiUnaMas #EndDeportation #BordersAreStupid

National borders are a military phenomenon, not a natural or a social or a cultural one. The “nations” they circumscribe are political lies, and the fortified frontiers they impose are bloody scars cut across the face of the earth. #AbolishBorders #DestroyAllNations

http://ift.tt/1iAURb6

http://ift.tt/1j0Zw9h No. #AbolishTheDeathPenalty