89 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2024
  2. Oct 2024
  3. Sep 2024
    1. they all seem to use the "fake it till you make it" strategy (mentalism, mind over matter)<br /> but most are stuck in the "fake it" phase, because the british/US empire is too strong

    1. 19:37 "in allen wirtschaftslehrbüchern wird die wirtschaft dargestellt wie eine technische maschine, basierend auf der idee von leon walras, dass man technische mechanik übertragen kann auf wirtschaftliche prozesse, und deswegen hat man so schöne gleichungen. wenn die wirtschaft wirklich so funktionieren würde, dann gäbs nichts besseres als eine zentrale steuerung. das ist auch der kern der klassischen volkswirtschaftslehre, zum beispiel John Maynard Keynes war nach dem 2. weltkrieg euphorisch von der soviet-wirtschaft, und es galt immer als klar dass eine zentrale planwirtschaft überlegen ist."<br /> 21:30 "die lehrbücher lehren eine wirtschaftsidee, aus deren perspektive (eine zentrale planwirtschaft) sehr wohl sinn machen würde"<br /> also das problem sind die klugscheisser von der hochschule, die noch nie gearbeitet haben und die den handwerkern "erklären" wie die welt funktioniert...<br /> mind over matter, "denken ist besser als machen", "learning by thinking", "learning by talking", ...<br /> solche klugscheisser haben wir ja schon genug in politik und bürokratie...

    1. Now we understand why there has to be an inner reality which is made of qualia and an outer reality which is made a lot of symbols, shareable symbols, what we call matter.

      for - unpack - key insight - with the postulate of consciousness as the foundation, it makes sense that this is - an inner reality made of qualia - and an outer reality made of shareable symbols we call matter - Federico Faggin - question - about Federico Faggin's ideas - in what way is matter a symbol? - adjacency - poverty mentality - I am the universe who wants to know itself question - in what way is matter a symbol? - Matter is a symbol in the sense that it - we describe reality using language, both - ordinary words as well as - mathematics - It is those symbolic descriptions that DIRECT US to jump from one phenomena to another related phenomena. - After all, WHO is the knower of the symbolic descriptions? - WHAT is it that knows? Is it not, as FF points out, the universe itself - as expressed uniquely through all the MEs of the world, that knows? - Hence, the true nature of all authentic spiritual practices is that - the reality outside of us is intrinsically the same as - the reality within us - our lebenswelt of qualia

  4. Aug 2024
    1. for - building new sustainable cities

      summary - Building new "sustainable cities from nothing often does not consider the embodied energy required to do so. When that is considered, it is usually not viable - A context where it is viable is where there is extreme poverty and inequality

      to - Why do old places matter? - sustainability - https://hyp.is/vlBLGlQFEe-EpqflmmlqnQ/savingplaces.org/stories/why-do-old-places-matter-sustainability

  5. Mar 2024
    1. for - rapid whole system change - Indy Johar - Dark Matter Labs

      Summary - Indy points out many salient features of what it will take for humanity to undergo a rapid transition out of our current existential poly-meta-perma-crisis - This talk is full of meta-level insights of our current situation, especially the blind spots, and challenges us to find ways to transform them

    1. 0:24 "what does rebellion look like?" -- answering the question "who are my friends?" -- the system hates my answer so much that cops are threatening to throw me in jail for distributing my book for free in public here in germany...

      effectively, my solution is tribalism, secession, small states, "nationalism", groups of 150 people (dunbars number) im permanent competition to each other, including permanent tribal wafare, because many small wars are better than few large wars, and because "pacifism" is a lie, pacifism is only playing for time and always leads to large wars.

      Goblin mode? china calls this "tang ping" (lying flat) or "guo re tze" (just pass the day, survive this day) (via serpentza on youtube) -- aka: escapism, second life, mentalism, mind over matter, knowledge is power, living in your head, idealism, high life, city life, depression, apathy, passive resistance, pessimism, nihilism, ignorance, "i dont care", Hikikomori, NEET, MGTOW, hedonism, stupid and happy, ...

      Lying flat - China's Silent Revolution<br /> by serpentza<br /> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWl7njLlXLU

      ps: only faggets wear socks without shoes

  6. Nov 2023
    1. it is easier to try to describe the move between matter-based science and experience-based phenomenology, on the one hand, and between phenomenology and contemplative spirituality on the other.
      • for: comparison -

      • meme

        • matter-based science to experience-based phenomenology
        • phenomenology and contemplative spirituality
  7. Jul 2023
    1. In a first, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may have glimpsed a rare type of star that astronomers aren’t even sure exists.

      Exciting!

  8. Apr 2023
    1. Iain McGilchrist for my book, he shared that he views matter as ‘a phase of consciousness’ in a similar way to how ice is a phase of water

      Quote - matter is a phase of consciousness

      Author - Iain McGilchrist

  9. Feb 2023
    1. keynote address in !" at the #entenary $eeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. %n this occasion he suggested that the fundamentalstructure of the universe was not matter but action
      • action, not matter, is the fundamental structure of the universe
    1. Master of all the living! Lord of Gods! King of the Universe! To Thee alone Belongs to tell the heavenly excellence Of those perfections wherewith Thou dost fill These worlds of Thine; Pervading, Immanent! How shall I learn, Supremest Mystery! To know Thee, though I muse continually? Under what form of Thine unnumbered forms Mayst Thou be grasped? Ah! yet again recount, Clear and complete, Thy great appearances, The secrets of Thy Majesty and Might, Thou High Delight of Men! Never enough Can mine ears drink the Amrit of such words!

      Arjuna is convinced that Krishna is the divine being and requests Him to describe His divine glories like divine nectar further. He is asking for him to reveal his glory and explain to him what his different forms are. Posing the question of which form he should grasp or hold on to. Earlier, Krishna means that he is Prakriti, which is defined as the prime material energy of which all matter is composed. "..is made of eight elements: earth, water, air, fire, akasha (“sky” or “space”), mind, intelligence, and ego. However, beyond his prakriti is another, higher form. This other form created and supports everything that exists and destroys it when the time comes. Though he has created many mortal bodies, Vishnu’s true self was never born and will never die. He is beyond such things; his true nature is eternal and changeless. "

      References Cabral, Carrie. “Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita: A God in His True Form.” Shortform Books, 5 Feb. 2021, https://www.shortform.com/blog/krishna-bhagavad-gita/#:~:text=To%20that%20end%2C%20Krishna%20in,mind%2C%20intelligence%2C%20and%20ego.

      “Prakriti Definition & Meaning.” Dictionary.com, Dictionary.com, https://www.dictionary.com/browse/prakriti.

  10. Dec 2022
  11. Nov 2022
    1. Guy de Maupassant, was no lawyer,but his advice can help guide lawyerswho seek precision in their writing.“Whatever you want to say,” he assert-ed, “there is only one word to expressit, only one verb to give it movement,only one adjective to qualify it. Youmust search for that word, that verb,that adjective, and never be contentwith an approximation, never resortto tricks, even clever ones, and neverhave recourse to verbal sleight-of-hand to avoid a difficulty.”11

      11 Guy de Maupassant, Selected Short Sto- ries 10-11 (Roger Colet ed., 1971) (Maupassant quoting French writer Gustave Flaubert).

  12. Oct 2022
  13. Aug 2022
    1. deny the current view, and hold the cortex to be something more than the surface of "projection" for every sensitive spot and every muscle in the body

      If we don't believe that the sensory and motor centers don't work hand in hand when it comes to emotions, they one could believe that the cortex is responsible for our body feeling emotional reactions.

  14. Jul 2022
  15. May 2022
  16. Apr 2022
    1. An experiment that could confirm the fifth state of matter in the universe—and change physics as we know it—has been published in a new paper from the University of Portsmouth. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1449240174198-2'); }); Physicist Dr. Melvin Vopson has already published research suggesting that information has mass and that all elementary particles, the smallest known building blocks of the universe, store information about themselves, similar to the way humans have DNA. Now, he has designed an experiment—which if proved correct—means he will have discovered that information is the fifth form of matter, alongside solid, liquid, gas and plasma. Dr. Vopson said: "This would be a eureka moment because it would change physics as we know it and expand our understanding of the universe. But it wouldn't conflict with any of the existing laws of physics. "It doesn't contradict quantum mechanics, electrodynamics, thermodynamics or classical mechanics. All it does is complement physics with something new and incredibly exciting." Dr. Vopson's previous research suggests that information is the fundamental building block of the universe and has physical mass. He even claims that information could be the elusive dark matter that makes up almost a third of the universe. He said: "If we assume that information is physical and has mass, and that elementary particles have a DNA of information about themselves, how can we prove it? My latest paper is about putting these theories to the test so they can be taken seriously by the scientific community." Dr. Vopson's experiment proposes how to detect and measure the information in an elementary particle by using particle-antiparticle collision. He said: "The information in an electron is 22 million times smaller than the mass of it, but we can measure the information content by erasing it. "We know that when you collide a particle of matter with a particle of antimatter, they annihilate each other. And the information from the particle has to go somewhere when it's annihilated." The annihilation process converts all the remaining mass of the particles into energy, typically gamma photons. Any particles containing information are converted into low-energy infrared photons. In the study Dr. Vopson predicts the exact energy of the infrared photons resulting from erasing the information. Dr. Vopson believes his work could demonstrate that information is a key component of everything in the universe and a new field of physics research could emerge.

      This idea of information having mass and the properties of other elementary principles is fascinating. Also the tie-ins to dark matter is really, really mind-bending.

  17. Mar 2022
    1. Melvin Vopson has proposed an experiment involving particle annihilation that could prove that information has mass, and by Einstein's mass-energy equivalence, information is also energy. If true, the experiment would also show that information is one of the states of matter.

      The experiment doesn't need a particle accelerator, but instead uses slow positrons at thermal velocities.

      Melvin Vopson is an information theory researcher at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom.

      A proof that information has mass (or is energy) may explain the idea of dark matter. Vopson's rough calculations indicate that 10^93 bits of information would explain all of the “missing” dark matter.

      Vopson's 2022 AIP Advances paper would indicate that the smallest theoretical size of digital bits, presuming they are stable and exist on their own would become the smallest known building blocks of matter.

      The width of digital bits today is between ten and 30 nanometers. Smaller physical bits could mean more densely packed storage devices.


      Vopson proposes that a positron-electron annihilation should produce energy equivalent to the masses of the two particles. It should also produce an extra dash of energy: two infrared, low-energy photons of a specific wavelength (predicted to be about 50 microns), as a direct result of erasing the information content of the particles.

      The mass-energy-information equivalence principle Vopson proposed in his 2019 AIP Advances paper assumes that a digital information bit is not just physical, but has a “finite and quantifiable mass while it stores information.” This very small mass is 3.19 × 1038 kilograms at room temperature.

      For example, if you erase one terabyte of data from a storage device, it would decrease in mass by 2.5 × 1025 kilograms, a mass so small that it can only be compared to the mass of a proton, which is about 1.67 × 1027 kilograms.

      In 1961, Rolf Landauer first proposed the idea that a bit is physical and has a well-defined energy. When one bit of information is erased, the bit dissipates a measurable amount of energy.

  18. Feb 2022
    1. We need to getour thoughts on paper first and improve them there, where we canlook at them. Especially complex ideas are difficult to turn into alinear text in the head alone. If we try to please the critical readerinstantly, our workflow would come to a standstill. We tend to callextremely slow writers, who always try to write as if for print,perfectionists. Even though it sounds like praise for extremeprofessionalism, it is not: A real professional would wait until it wastime for proofreading, so he or she can focus on one thing at a time.While proofreading requires more focused attention, finding the rightwords during writing requires much more floating attention.

      Proofreading while rewriting, structuring, or doing the thinking or creative parts of writing is a form of bikeshedding. It is easy to focus on the small and picayune fixes when writing, but this distracts from the more important parts of the work which really need one's attention to be successful.

      Get your ideas down on paper and only afterwards work on proofreading at the end. Switching contexts from thinking and creativity to spelling, small bits of grammar, and typography can be taxing from the perspective of trying to multi-task.


      Link: Draft #4 and using Webster's 1913 dictionary for choosing better words/verbiage as a discrete step within the rewrite.


      Linked to above: Are there other dictionaries, thesauruses, books of quotations, or individual commonplace books, waste books that can serve as resources for finding better words, phrases, or phrasing when writing? Imagine searching through Thoreau's commonplace book for finding interesting turns of phrase. Naturally searching through one's own commonplace book is a great place to start, if you're saving those sorts of things, especially from fiction.

      Link this to Robin Sloan's AI talk and using artificial intelligence and corpuses of literature to generate writing.

  19. Nov 2021
    1. Many studies have been undertaken on the value of unpaid domestic and care work, which is also non-market, non-transactional and not included in formal economic accounts. Similarly, the unpaid care work for the wider community is missing off the balance sheet. Both are essential for the functioning of the economy that is counted.In Australia, this was estimated to be almost half of the country’s GDP, with those statistics from over twenty years ago. More recent statistics for the state of Victoria reveal a similar picture.

      These studies illustrate the huge under appreciation of the value contribution of the commons and work not showing up on GDP, the dark matter of GDP.

    1. Honestly, I don't know. Strictly speaking it's different to a window being opened at a specific size (I can see the difference). I don't know whether that difference is material. Seeing as these are tests, I'd like to remove as many unknowns as possible. If someone can tell me that it makes no difference then I'd be happy.
  20. Oct 2021
    1. Time, energy, and matter

      This article refers to the site I created to document the design process for the builders collective: time, energy, and matter, which redirects to timeenergyresources.com.

    1. time as the new currency

      Marilyn Waring

      Time: The New Currency

      Women tend to be excluded from the national economy because their work is not paid and therefore not value or factored into the Gross Domestic Product of a nation. Money, then, is a mechanism for disempowerment.

  21. May 2021
    1. Despite what some email marketers and developers will tell you, semantics in email do matter. Not only do they provide accessible hooks for navigating an email, they can provide fallback styles that help maintain the hierarchy of emails in the unfortunate event CSS isn’t loaded or supported.
  22. Apr 2021
    1. (Yes, I realize from a technical, end-user perspective this really doesn't matter.)

      The word "technical" in this sentence doesn't seem to belong or to clarify anything. I think it would be clearer without it.

      But I think I understand what he's saying, which is that technical details don't matter to the end user. They only know/see/care if it works or not.

  23. Mar 2021
  24. Feb 2021
  25. Jan 2021
  26. Dec 2020
  27. Oct 2020
  28. Aug 2020
  29. Jul 2020
  30. Jun 2020
    1. What happens to matter when it undergoes chemical changes? The Law of conservation of mass says that "Atoms are neither created, nor distroyed, during any chemical reaction." Thus, the same collection of atoms is present after a reaction as before the reaction. The changes that occur during a reaction just involve the rearrangement of atoms.
  31. Oct 2019
  32. Apr 2019
    1. Being a teenager is hard; there are constant social and emotional pressures that have just been introduced into the life of a middle or high schooler, which combines with puberty to create a ticking time bomb. By looking at the constant exposure to unreasonable expectations smartphones and social media create, we can see that smartphones are leading to an increased level of depression and anxiety in teenagers, an important issue because we need to find a safe way to use smartphones for the furture generations that are growing up with them. Social media is a large part of a majority of young adults life, whether it includes Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, or some combination of these platforms, most kids have some sort of presence online. Sites like Facebook and Instagram provide friends with a snapshot of an event that happened in your life, and people tend to share the positive events online, but this creates a dangerous impact on the person scrolling.​ When teens spend hours scrolling through excluisvely happy posts, it creates an unrealistic expectation for how real life should be. Without context, teenagers often feel as if their own life is not measuring up to all of their happy friends, but real-life will never measure up to the perfect ones expressed online. Picture Picture Furthermore, social media sites create a way for teenagers to seek external validation from likes and comments, but when the reactions online are not perceived as enough it dramatically alters a young adults self-confidence. This leads to the issue of cyberbullying. There are no restrictions on what you can say online, sometimes even annonimously, so often people choose to send negative messages online. Bullying is not a new concept, but with online bullying, there is little to no escape as a smartphone can be with a teenager everywhere, and wherever the smartphone goes the bullying follows.This makes cyberbullying a very effective way to decrease a youth's mental health, in fact, cyberbullying triples the risk of suicide in adolescents, which is already the third leading cause of death for this age group.

  33. Jan 2019
    1. anguage come to be more trustworthy than matter?

      People seem to trust in themselves more than what's outside themselves. Even though language is constructed, it's our construct, something we made, and therefore (?) something we can place our faith in more so than in matter, something we had less of a hand in making. When we place our faith in things outside ourselves, we become more vulnerable--we open ourselves to other things as well as to the possibility of being wrong.

    2. challenges the positioning of materiality as either a given or a mereeffect of human agency.

      I'll be the first to admit I wasn't able to follow all of what Barad is tackling here, but I'll take a stab at a summary: Barad argues that we need to bring matter/the material into our concepts of rhetoric, agency, and performance--to not bind these issues only to the human but to see them posthumanly, to leave behind the assumption that these concepts can only be 'wielded' or conducted by humans.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BHXCIR29J0

    1. ubjectivity canthen be re-defined as an expanded self, whose relational capacity is notconfined within the human species, but includes non-anthropomorphicelements.

      Like mholder pointed out, this also speaks to Foucault's "Self Writing." In this case, I think the connection to the notebook and/or letter (correspondence) is important, where the "expanded self" is due in large part thanks to the non-anthropomorphic materials the writer interacts with (a la Barad's intra-activity, if I'm making that connect aright).

    2. a set of technologically inter-linkedmaterial culture

      This resonates with many of the other articles: Rickert's materialist rhetorics, Barad's materiality, ...

  34. Oct 2018
    1. Recent reviews on DFT may be found in Jones and Gunnarsson (1989) and Dreizler andGross (1990)

      This is before the PAW method came along (Blochl '94), so probably nothing method-specific.

  35. Aug 2018
    1. You might have seen the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter in the previous step. In this 6-minute video, #BlackTwitter after #Ferguson, we meet activists who were involved in the movement and learn about their own uses of Twitter as a platform of protest. Hashtags, when used like this, can be extremely complex in the way they represent ideas, communities and individuals.
  36. Jul 2018
    1. The scene could come right out of today’s Blue Lives Matter meme factory. Along with images of warriors, weapons, and German shepherds, pictures of children—often little blond girls—hugging cops infuse the movement with an ominous sentimentalism.
    2. The Thin Blue Line runs less risk of alienating potential supporters; the American flag, filtered through a lens darkly, might send just the right message.
    3. The Blue Lives Matter movement, which began after the December 20, 2014, slaying of two New York City police officers, soon adopted the Thin Blue Line flag. The murders were the catalyst for what quickly became a rebuttal to Black Lives Matter, its insistence that we pay more attention to killer cops than to cops killed in the line of duty.
  37. Mar 2018
  38. Nov 2017
  39. May 2017
  40. Apr 2017
    1. Material conditions matter, not because they “support” particulardiscourses that are the actual generative factors in the formation of bodiesbut rather becausematter comes to matterthrough the iterative intra-activity of the world in its becoming

      So could this also be formulated as "matter comes to matter" through the +s or through "bleeding"?

  41. Feb 2017
    1. he did not scruple to chastise African Ameri-cans, particularly black men, for running after trivial pursuits, for lacking in educa-tional and professional ambition, and for avoiding the challenging task of speaking up for their people's rights.

      The Black Lives Matter movement has a similar dialogue embedded in it:

      But this call to "be better" puts the onus back on the oppressed on a whole other level:

    1. criminal history as proof that he was a bad actor

      As a student recently wrote in a brainstorm of questions, "Why are people judged by what they were?" https://www.instagram.com/p/86A-X7OmNX/?taken-by=paulrallison That's something else going from a "criminal history" to a trait: "bad actor." Maybe he was unlucky enough to not be able to escape the criminal justice system. Maybe he was a good person who had something terrible follow him.

    1. northeast Portland

      Here's a history of this the process of gentrification that Linda Christensen uses in here gentrification curriculum: BLEEDING ALBINA: A HISTORY OF COMMUNITY DISINVESTMENT, 1940–2000

    2. "Thank God for gentrification," one of the men yelled into a megaphone. "Someone had to clean up the neighborhood."

      The three men yelling this at Black Lives Matter demonstrators must not have learned their lessons in Linda Christensen's English class at Jefferson High School http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/EJ/1052-nov2015/EJ1052Focus.pdf

  42. Jul 2016
  43. Nov 2015
    1. "It makes me feel like a failure," he said of that photo. "I'm sitting here wishing I had done more. I wish I had made one more phone call. I wish we would have been able to give him a few more hours."

      I'm deeply saddened by this response. I've felt it so often. But what would Jamar have been able to do with those few more hours? What could have stopped this tragedy from speeding down to its inevitable end.

    2. he didn't have the structure to be the person he wanted to be

      What does that mean?!? Is it something in him? In our schools? In his experiences in his adoptive family? In not having a steady job? In getting pushed in and out of jail? What?

    3. Clark's sly grin in a selfie, wearing his Copeland Trucking hat.

      Jamar Clark

    4. terroristic threats

      Come again?

    5. "He cared about his family being connected with each other. He cared about having somebody care about him."

      I guess this is a basic human need: connection. But I'm struck with how sensitive Jamar was about this need. This sentence makes me want to write a song or a poem about Jamar, the lovely repetition of "cared" and "care."

    6. When things were going well, he was a nurturing, loving man who was drawn to her four children,

      This sentence and others in this article point to Jamar's connections to family: biological and adoptive parents, 14 siblings, wanting a family of his own, and a nurturing, loving man. And the police call him a "bad actor." Which is it? I guess he could be both. What does this phrase "When things were going well..." mean? Does it mean when Tim was providing employment and a motel room?

    7. The system failed miserably

      That seems pretty clear by now, a tragic series of events with Jamar going "in and out" of prison for three of his most precious years, his early 20's. But what can we imagine instead? How might "the system" respond to "troubled youth"? Who can we help now to avoid Jamar's path?

    8. Hoag was sure

      What gave Tim Hoag this optimism? What was he missing? Or is it just luck who can move past "it" and who can't.

    9. Clark spent much of his 20's in and out of prison

      Once back on the streets there were times when I couldn't afford to take the bus I didn't know where I was going to sleep at night Thank God for Tim who would get me a motel room, and a job when he could.

      I've made mistakes in my life, and I've paid my dues.

      When the cops stopped us after a high speed chase in July, did they have to beat me too?

    10. Tim Hoag and his wife hired Clark earlier this year

      I want to know more about Tim Hoag and his wife and their rental properties. And how Jamar came into their orbit. How could government have supported Tim Hoag and his wife in their reaching out to Jamar?

      Here's the beginning of a lead to learn more about Tim Hoag. He's the President of Copland Trucking. http://www.copelandtruc-king.com/team.htm Image Description

    11. petty misdemeanor for possessing a small amount of marijuana in 2009.

      Piecing this together, it seems that many of Jamar's troubles started with this "petty misdemeanor" for marijuana possession when he was 18. How can we see this story as being about a young Black man who was ensnared in a system of prison and crime that would only make things worse for him.

    12. At times he couldn't afford bus fare for work and struggled with stable housing. Hoag put him up at a motel for a few days to help out, and gave him as many hours of work at Copeland Trucking as he could, helping in the warehouse or on moves.

      I'm writing this from a workshop that Renee Watson and Linda Christensen are doing at NCTE about housing and racism in Portland. Reading this sentence, I can't help wonder how housing and incarceration and racism and joblessness are at the heart of Jamar's anger and difficulties in his relationship with his girlfriend. And given his struggles for stable housing, doesn't that help us understand what is going on with Jamar as he faces the police after having another fight with his girlfriend. The last sentence in this article must be given attention. How could we have done one more thing to help him?

    13. protesters outside the police precinct insist Clark was handcuffed before he was shot, which police dispute.

      Okay, so which of these is more credible. Isn't it irresponsible journalism to just report such an important detail as he said/she said? Which of the people who the reporter interviewed seemed most credible? Who was actually there?

    14. a July arrest for fleeing police in a high-speed chase.

      Sarah Gartnor, a friend of Chris Rodgers -- who took us over to the 4th Precinct yesterday (Thursday) -- told us that when she was sitting in the Mayor's living room the night before as part of a protest, a special prosecutor told her and her fellow protesters that Jamar had been beaten at the end of this high-speed chase. He was about to testify about that beating in January, he told her.

    15. on probation

      He's had a hard time, but this sounds ugly.

    16. three years in and out of prison

      What does this mean? Was he is prison or not?

    17. they contend he was reaching for an officer's gun when he was shot.

      Okay, he was either reaching for a gun or he was handcuffed. How does a reporter merely report this without pointing out that this is clearly NOT what many witnesses said happened. And I would assume that she did follow-up interviews with quoting these eye-witnesses. what did these "union reps" have to say about why their story is so different?

    18. police union representatives

      Putting this out there like this: Are we expected to trust this or not. Is this totally up to the reader and his/her background as to whether or not we are to trust the "police union representatives?" Certainly we can all agree that these reps have a reason to make Clark look bad. Why doesn't the writer remind us of that fact?

    19. He cared deeply about his parents — biological and adoptive — and his 14 siblings, and had a job and hopes of going to college.

      What a sentence! I keep reading it and wondering what he would say if he could read it. Twenty-four -- with the last three years in prison, living at times in a motel, and he cared deeply about his parents and 14 siblings!

    20. troubled past that Jamar Clark struggled for years to escape

      Is this a formula? Dragging up a victim's past? And what's going to happen as I read this (again). On my first reading, I was upset with how Jamar was trying (sometimes unsuccessfully) to escape the criminal justice system, and now it finally caught up to him.