(If you aren’t familiar with the background of this story, here’s some background.)

First, of course, I wanted to be on the “inside” of the story and really see the play-by-play of what was happening.  I tried to go to the publicly announced planning center, a chat room on irc.anonops.net.  Unfortunately, this domain name had also been the target of the volley of attacks that was transpiring.  However, a nice gentlemen in the #wikileaks channel of irc.freenode.net directed me to the server by IP address: 88.198.224.117.  Do have a visit with your IRC client if you are interested.

Upon arrival, I was prompted to check out #operationpayback, the central meeting spot for these hacktivists.  Once in the channel, I was astounded at the pace of the conversation – about 5-7 comments EVERY SECOND.

Most were updates on the state of the LOIC (Low-Orbit Ion Cannon), the tool of choice for taking mastercard.com down from the Internet (LOIC is, or at least was, a fairly mainstream tool for testing server defenses).  The tone was absolutely jovial – mastercard.com was down, and the mainstream media regarded the events of this chatroom as headline-worthy.

Yet, I did not get a sense of constructive, radical civic duty.  In fact it seemed to me that the average age (judging by comment maturity and grammer) was probably about 14.

I do understand how a person of a different bent might derive a bit of glee from the spectacle of the denial of service attack being coordinated.  I, however, noticed a very different sentiment unfold in my gut:

Mere destruction of existing power structures, without contemporaneous (or, for that matter, preceding) construction of alternatives is unlikely to ever result in sustainable positive change.

May I suggest to all the people who are distressed about Amazon, Visa, Mastercard, and whomever else abandoning Wikileaks that their mission needs to be to build peaceful, sustainable alternatives to Amazon, Visa, and Mastercard?

May I further suggest that this is the only truly radical use of information technology?  Destruction has been possible (and in fact normative) since the beginning of time.  Only now, however, is parallel construction possible.

Stop the temper tantrum.  Stop the blame game.  Instead, just work toward an information age where the the quasi-censorship that has characterized the industrial age is mathematically precluded at the infrastructural level.  I suspect that thanks for this work will come not only from Wikileaks (and all those who are spiritually motivated by its basic premises) but in fact also from governments and corporations too.  Everybody has an interest in the tech infrastructure working more efficiently and smoothly, and this will naturally translate to lower costs and increased availability in disadvantaged communities.

Make no mistake: I’m not happy about the treatment wikileaks is getting. But is this really the best that we can come up with as a response? Have we really run out of civil, ethical, and constructive ways to deal with these kinds of issues? If so, doesn’t that make us as bad as “them?”

I urge the young, tech-savvy people who are concerned about technological freedom: shut down LOIC, start up Eclipse and Miro, and get to work – there’s plenty to be done.

In January of 2009, these two talented fighters met in the cage for the first time, with top contender Cerrone looking to dethrone Varner at a time when, by all accounts, the division was running rather thin.  Apart from these two and future (and now current) champion Benson Henderson, no real competition existed in the WEC lightweight division.

Their 5 round battle was historic – widely and rightly regarded as one of the best fights in the division’s history.

Jamie Varner, while not completely dominating the fight, unambiguously won the first 3 rounds.  He exercised far better control of the cage, landed a higher percentage of his strikes, and was the unquestionably superior wrestler.  The 4th round was much closer, but many commentators still had it going narrowly to Varner 10-9.

Yet, the 4th round signaled a clear turn for the fight, and as we’d later learn, for the WEC lightweight division.  Jamie Varner was loosing his control and energy, and Cerrone was gaining on him.  Cerrone was becoming the best fighter he had yet been – it was truly a pleasure to watch.

At the beginning of the fifth round, Varner signaled to Cerrone that he wanted a hug.  The two fighters, bruised and bloody, raced to the center of the cage where they took the first ten seconds to celebrate each other.  They had a long embrace, and Jamie Varner gave the clear impression that he wanted to bring out the very best in Cerrone for the final round.  They smiled, the audience went ballistic, and Cerrone let out a loud whoop.  It was one of the best moments in the history of American Mixed Martial Arts.  The message was clear:  These two fighters respected and – dare I say – loved each other and their sport so much that they could take 10 seconds to stop brutalizing each other and express themselves emotionally.

After these 10 seconds, the fight immediately took on the most serious and aggressive tone yet.  Both men landed several devastating blows and showed off their very best skills.  Varner was fading, and he knew it.  He was ready – even proud, to hand the title away.  All eyes watched as he fell to his knees, seconds away from fading into TKO.

And then, something terrible happened.

Donald Cerrone, a professional fighter and trained martial artist, through a heavy, full-speed knee directly at Jamie Varner’s head as he sat on his knees.

Apart from obviously being completely prohibited by the unified MMA rules, this manuever was reckless, unsportsmanlike, and potentially deadly for his opponent who had just shown him the very best affection a man can after being beat half senseless.

The knee glanced Varner’s head and right temple.  The referee immediately intervened.  Everyone gasped.  A collective, “what. the. fuck. did he just do?” escapsed the lips of the MMA fan community.

All attention focused on Varner’s well-being for that moment.  The replay showed that the knee had only glanced, so a sigh of relief was in order.

Yet, when Varner was asked, on the spot, if he was OK, he responded, “I can’t see straight.”

Now, think about this for a moment.  Is this anything other than a candid, honest answer?  No, it is not.  Surely he truly was unable to see straight, whether due to Cerrone’s knee or otherwise.  Did Varner expect these words to end the fight?  Probably not.  Did he expect these words to change the course of the WEC lightweight division, and perhaps all of MMA?  Definitely not.

Yet, hearing this, the referee ended the fight, sending the decision to the judge’s scorecards.  Strangely, the fight was ended due to “incidental” contact on the part of Cerrone.  This is perposterous.  Cerrone intentionally through the knee, and intentionally aimed at Varner’s head.  No other conclusion is reasonable.  Was it done with outright malice?  No, probably not.  Cerrone was probably just really amped up and lost control for a second.  Nevertheless, nothing about the technique was “incidental.”  It was a textbook example of a prohibited knee to the head.

Amid the confusion, the judges announced the obvious: Based on the scores, Varner had won the fight.

At this time, some members of the audience began to boo.  This caused Jamie Varner, who isn’t much of a public speaker to begin with, to loose his cool and approach tears.

At this point, I expected, or at least hoped, for Donald Cerrone to do the only responsible thing.  He had a moral imperative to take the microphone from Varner and say, “Hey, listen up.  This is not Jamie’s fault.  I threw an illegal knee in the heat of the moment, and the fight got called.  It was a mistake, and one that I will work to make sure I never make again.  With Jamie’s blessing, we’ll get a rematch ASAP.”

This simple response would have elicited an uproarious approval from the crowd and averted a feud that has plagued the sport ever since that night.

Not only did Cerrone not make such a remark, but he clearly did not make any effort to change his conduct.

Two fights later, Cerrone, facing Ed Ratcliff, Cerrone threw another illegal knee – to Ratcliff’s groin.  And then another illegal knee – to Ratcliff’s groin.  And then ANOTHER illegal knee – to Ratcliff’s groin.  Although 2 points down and sure to loose on the scorecards, Cerrone secured a rear naked choke and submitted the newly sterile Ratcliff.

Another fight with Varner was scheduled for 20 months after the initial one.  Cerrone, determined, as Varner accurately put it, to “set the sport back 10 years,” referred to Varner as a “fag” and express hope that Varner would become “the first death in American MMA.”

How, after all this miscondcut and bigotry, this man is still allowed to fight, is a question you’ll have to ask the WEC.

The rematch, unlike their earlier fight, was slow and frankly boring as hell.  Neither fighter looked like a professional-level athlete.  Varner was just plain nervous (understandable for a man who’d been issued a straight-up death threat vis a vis the fight in question) and Cerrone looked decidedly mediocre.

Cerrone out-wrestled, out-boxed and out-fought Varner in every round by just enough to get the score.  Like all three judges and probably every other viewer, I had the fight at 30-27 at its conclusion.

Cerrone managed to refrain from throwing any illegal knees and actually showed a modicum of control and cognition of the rules of the sport in which he was participating.  At the dojo at which I train, this would probably qualify Cerrone to graduate to from White Belt to Yellow.  So congratulations, Donald, you can now be regarded as something other than a completely out-of-control bigot with an “I don’t care about no rules” attitude.  Now you are just a bigot.

Nothing about Thursday’s fight suggested to me that Cerrone was a better fighter than Varner, only that he was having a better night.  Like every other fan with a pulse, I am looking forward to part III of this saga.  I hope that by then both fighters have returned to the attitudes that characterized their first match.

One of the tenets of Django (albeit not a “top-level” holding like DRY, OaoO, minimal code, explicit over implicit, etc.) is that Django declines to use “Magic” unless it is overwhelmingly easier than the mundane solution that it replaces.  Django also veers toward the agnostic – meaning that one can use any naming paradigm, template strategy, URL convention, etc.

Exactly what techniques constitute “Magic” may be in the eye of the beholder, but generally we think of magic encompassing those techniques that are not part of a programming paradigm, but that work anyway “just because.”  Gnosticism, on the other hand, is pretty obvious when it rears itself: If you MUST use jQuery or you MUST name every variable drupal.something, you know that you are not working with an agnostic framework.

The SlashRoot team is currently working on a great project for Carbon Ads – a project that aims to enable small publishers to collectively sell ad space to pre-vetted, exclusive, and otherwise unattainable advertisers.  Think Adsense meets your favorite organic co-op.

Among the interesting elements to tackle in Django, as is often challenging in MVC frameworks, in the question of how to model different types of users.

The lazy (inorganic) way, of course, is to simply apply a “type” attribute to the user model and then ForeignKey each individual user class.  However, this leaves tremendous room for error.  For example (and this example in fact has come up in this project) – what if the developer creating the “admin” model has a different idea of how to track names than the developer creating the “publisher” model – may one of them thinks that the full name belongs in a single field while the other separates first and last names.  This is a major problem for any page that lists all users by real name.

To me, the most organic solution is to separate elements into two categories: Those that two or more classes of people have vs. those that only one class of people has.  That way, the attributes in the former category can be assigned to a parent class (perhaps as an optional field) while the latter can belong exclusively in a child class, on a separate database table to enhance performance.

So, how does Django treat this contingency?  With magic, I’m afraid.

The Django documentation on this point suggests using the “lower case” name of the class in question, which has two deviations from the general Django philosophy:

1) It is gnostic, plain and simple.  It assumes that you have adopted upper-case or CamelCase naming conventions for your models, and that you can use lowercase as an alternative.

2) It seems to me to be magic.  There is no *reason* why the lower-case class name should refer to the logical question of whether or not an object is in a child class of a parent model.  It just…. works.

Mind you, I can deal with both these issues.  I think that the “magic” issue is of more concern to the programming purist, because it can be genuinely confusing.  Case in point, I actually had to wonder how to access the “not magic” of this solution – although “if not someobject.somelowercaseclass” does in fact return TRUE for objects outside the child class in question, it took me some time to wrap my head around this, simply because “someobject.somelowercaseclass” is not instinctively a logical value to me – the “magic” distracted my view for a moment.

Thus, I had this interesting (and perhaps telling, I think) exchange in #django:

<jMyles> Philosophical question:  Does the ability to ask for a child class with lower-case lettering represent “magic”?  (see: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/models/#id7)

<jMyles> To rephrase my question: Is the use of a lowercase letter to inquire about a child-class part of an established programming technique?  Or is it a (rare) example of magic in Django?

<igloo_x> jMyles> what do you mean “child class”

<jMyles> igloo_x: Actually I mean child model

<jMyles> igloo_x: Like “Restaurant” becomes “restaurant” in the test in this example: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/models/#id7

<jMyles> igloo_x: Also, in that example, how can I ask if the object is NOT in the child class “restaurant”?

<jMyles> igloo_x: I’m looking at the third code block down from that link – “If you have a Place  that is also a Restaurant, you can get from the Place object to the Restaurant  object by using the lower-case version of the model name:”

<igloo_x> it’s magic, as far as I know. you can override it though. I think the argument is ‘related_name’ or something

<jMyles> igloo_x: OK, that’s what I thought.    And then, how can I ask if an object is NOT in that class?

<jMyles> igloo_x: ie, “if p.restaurant:” works fine, but how can I ask if it is not in that child class?

<igloo_x> i’m not sure about that, I’ve never messed with model inheritance before

<igloo_x> does “if not p.restaurant:” work though?

<jMyles> igloo_x: wow.  yes it does – mad overthinking on my part.

<igloo_x> good old python!

They drove around with a car, taking photos of the public surroundings of their car (that’s how they make StreetView).  While so doing, they picked up and recorded whatever wireless signals were coming in to their car.

Now people are whining that they are being spied upon.

Does anybody really think that preventing this kind of conduct has anything to do with making our communities secure against unwanted surveillance?  Is this line of defense the best we’ve got?

If you stand at your doorway, yelling at the top of your lungs about many intimate, private details of your life, is it fair to accuse a passerby of illegal (or unethical) surveillance because they happen to be recording their surroundings with an audio recorder?

Do you think that members of congress will rally to your defense, accusing those same pedestrians of spying on you?

There are plenty of very secure options for wireless communication.  If you aren’t using any of them, that’s your prerogative.  If you abstain from secure practices while at the same time communicating about sensitive issues which you bizarrely regard as private, that’s your problem.

On the bigger issue of Google being a scary monster of information collection… Sure, I see your point.  While on one hand, the information they collect is, in every practice I know of, voluntary (search phrases, email contents on Gmail, advertising clicks, cookies, the Google Toolbar, and many other methods), it’s not any less scary that they know more than anybody else about the modern polity.

I’m not usually a defender of google or any other giant corporation – I’ve expressed my fair share of google skepticism.  In this case, I think they’ve actually done wrong by repeatedly apologizing, but I guess that’s a PR move.

Nevertheless, their amazing (and thankless!) gift two weeks ago of releasing the VP8 codec to the public domain under an open source license was perhaps the single most significant act of bolstering independent radical journalism in the (still short) history of website-based video delivery.  Still not as profound as the movement that Miro represents, I’ll grant, but big (and a LOT more expensive).

To my mind, Google gave us as $124.6 million dollar gift, and I think we have a responsibility to accept it in full if we want to take advantage of it. That means in turn taking full responsibility for our network presence.  If your upload stream includes poignant, radical, inspirational content encoded in a free codec for the world to cherish, good.  If your upload stream (and wireless connection) includes unencrypted content that you irrationally regard as private, bad.

It’s not really a name worth remembering, as the person who is identified by that name is not worth the oxygen that he removes from the atmosphere during respiration.

Paul Schene is the criminal scumbag who beat the shit out of a 15-year old girl and dragged her around by her hair in Seattle (warning: shocking video). He also happens to be a police officer, suckling on the public teet to feed himself between abusive episodes. Oh, and he’s possibly also a murderer, as I discovered (and put the Huffington Post onto) a year ago today.

As far as I know, he hasn’t yet departed the mortal coil and departed for hell yet, so I’m wondering: does anybody know where he is now?

I just emailed Sgt. Sean Whitcomb, the media relations director for the Seattle PD:

Hello there – I’m a journalist from New York. I’m just wondering – what ever happened to Paul Schene? Is he still on administrative leave? If so, is it paid or unpaid? Has the case against him progressed at all?

I’ll let you know if he responds. Sgt. Whitcomb had this to say:

Hey Justin,

I work for the Seattle Police Department. Paul Schene formerly worked for the King County Sheriff’s Office. I believe he was fired, charged, acquitted by “hung jury” and awaiting retrial. Call either KCSO or check the Seattle Times for the latest updates.

Best regards,

Sean

…..so, I’ve emailed the only email address I can find for the KCSO (sheriff@kingcounty.gov) and asked the same question.

Another Update:

Sgt. Jim Laing of the King’s County Sheriff’s Office says:

Paul Schene was terminated for cause by the Sheriff on September 9, 2009 after an internal investigation. He was charged with assault and tried in January, 2010. This resulted in a mistrial. He is to be tried again on June 1, 2010.

Also:

I am getting quite a lot of traffic for the search phrase “Paul Schene.”  I have checked and in fact this page is the #1 search result for that phrase.  I surmise that Paul has now read this article.  So, Mr. Schene, what say you?  I want to offer you the opportunity to be seen as a human being and begin to clean up your tarnished name.  I’ll post whatever response you have – front, top, and center of this post – if you send it immediately.  If, on the other hand, you wait until the end of your trial in an effort to “decline to speak while legal action is pending,” an excuse I find detestable, you will lose this opportunity to control the content that is most strongly associated with your name in the world.  I suggest starting with a sincere apology.  Email me at justin@justinholmes.com.

….now before you jump on me about the “order of magnitude” comment with encryption – I fully realize that with increasing strength that decryption becomes several orders of magnitude more difficult, but as this was not a technology conference, I didn’t want to belabor the point.

Of course the (captial-R) Republican Party has been a miserable failure in representing (small-r) republican views in my lifetime, so I’m not sure why in this instance I expect anything more.

The problem is that in this instance, the statist / socialist perspective is fundamentally correct about one thing: The health care system of the United States is poorly designed for efficiency and efficacy as a system.

Imagine, if the current system were invented as a full system, the kind of conversation leading to its invention: “Let’s base health coverage around employment status – most of the people who are employed can have a product we’ll call “insurance” but that will really be a buffet-style hodgepodge of health services. We’ll have a whole slew of different plans and practices so as to avoid large-scale negotiation for the benefit of the consumer. People who are self-employed or not-employed will be kinda screwed, as will those who happen to be sick the day before they get a job – pre-existing conditions are a liability, you know. People who are young and destitute or people who are over a particular arbitrary age will be covered by a mix of their home state government and the federal government. All the while, no solid block of informed consumers will exist to challenge the status quo as a market force.”

Now I realize that’s an oversimplification, but my point is that, while pretty much everybody sees the need for a massive change to the health care system, only the statist / socialist perspective has risen up with a really great sounding alternative:

“Every single person will be required to pay into a collective hold, for which on their behalf a single entity will negotiate the best prices and practices. Each person then will be entitled to coverage with a fraction of a percent of the system’s resources leaving as overhead or profit.”

It’s not hard to understand how a person can find this alternative compelling!

Making it even more difficult to resist, proponents are able to point to many nation-states around the world where such systems are deployed effectively and to the delight of the citizenry.

Now, on the other hand, look at the narrative of reform offered by the anarchist / republican perspective. I don’t know of one. I can’t think of one! Instead, we merely point out the many (and scary) inevitable pitfalls of asking the most powerful military hegemon in history to take care of our health. We sound terribly academic and disconnected, and we offer no systemic perspective on what our ideal system will look like.

This is the problem.

Thus, henceforth, I’m suggesting that we stop or at least curtail all criticism of the current “reform” proposals. We take Obama (and the curious word “Obamacare”) out of our lexicon and out of our cross-hairs. Instead we relentlessly espouse our vision for taking care of people – all people – without the heavy hand of government.

I don’t know all the details, but just to get us started, it goes something like this:

We start by ending all criminal liability for the act of putting anything into one’s own body. We restore and strengthen the notion that, across the system, each person is the sole owner and operator of their own biological organism.

We restore and re-examine the role of plant-based medicines, making coca, poppy, hemp, and all other plants legal to cultivate.

We repeal those laws which create the artificial concept of “intellectual property,” at least as far as psychoactive compounds are concerned. We thus end government protection of pharmaceutical companies who inflate their prices by thousands of percent. Medicines of all kinds become affordable again, and lo and behold! More, rather than fewer, enterprising young scientists become interested in open source medicine.

We create a rich, comfortable, and easy-to-use wiki-like environment, in which people can list the symptoms of any malady from which they may be suffering. They can also list the remedies which have helped them in the past, and together, as a community, we can create a massive database of trends for all sorts of diseases.

In this online environment, people in similar biological conditions can talk to one another in a live environment and have occasional support meetings and form consumer support-and-wellness groups.

Practitioners of medicine, both conventional and alternative, can advertise their services and be hired as advisors by these support groups, being paid directly instead of through a convoluted coverage system. If, for example, they want to make $50 / hour, they can charge a 10-person group $10 each for a two-hour session, and answer all of their questions.

The concept of “insurance” can be re-introduced and distinguished from buffet-style comprehensive coverage. Most people will likely opt-out of insurance, realizing that the act of purchasing insurance is actually a bet that they will become sick or die sooner rather than later. On the other hand, some will purchase policies to cover unlikely catastrophic events. Such insurance will be very cheap.

People can once again choose for themselves which tests and procedures are important, and the incentive structure will be one of conservation, as they’ll have to pay for each one.

As overhead and systemic costs are reduced, people who currently find themselves spending outrageous amounts on “coverage” for themselves, their families, and their employees can instead invest in medical centers or charities in their communities which can care for people who truly need complicated and expensive procedures but can’t pay for them.

Support groups can also use their presence to help doctors help the poor. In the example above, if each participant pays $11 for the session, the doctor will have an extra $10. Assuming the doctor is willing to work for half price for charity, she needs to administer only five such sessions a week in order to administer a free one for people who cannot afford the $10 fee. Surgeons can work the same way, albeit on a larger scale, just as they did before government regulation got us into the mess we are in today.

Some doctors and other medical professionals will make long-lasting relationships and be able to charge a bit more money as they get older and more trusted. Some of them will make very good money practicing their art, and that’s OK. In fact, that’s great. Young people will again have a reason to follow their passion for caring about people instead of studying pharmaceutical patent law or insurance adjustment expediting.

Of course none of us has all the answers, but I think that most people have never stopped to think about what kind of alternative the republican / anarchist perspective has to offer in the health care debate. It’s time to change that.

Also, and perhaps most importantly, the open-source movement and the progress of technology make all of these ideas (and lots of even more innovate ideas!) not only possible, but inevitable. So it’s time for us to become optimistic and take some pride in our ability to help each other and keep each other well.

I was informed today that the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has agreed to hear oral arguments in Holmes and Partington v. Poskanzer et. al., a case in which I am (obviously) a plaintiff.  The case is now nearly three years old and has been through a number of twists and turns.

WikiPaltz coverage here.

Also, there’s a documentary called Campus Coup that explains most of the story. It’s about 85 minuets long.

• That no gift I receive will have caused suffering of any kind.  This means no slave made goods, no products tested on animals, nothing made in a prison, etc.
• Gifts that will help advance the cause of liberty and peace in the world, such as:
  • A donation, in my name, to Students for Sensible Drug Policy, an organization that has made me who I am.
  • A donation, in my name, to the Legal Support Fund of the RNC 8 – eight young people charged with terrorism merely for dissenting to government policies.
  • A donation to Campus Coup for the purpose of printing and distributing copies of this documentary on DVD or other means.
  • A promise, made to me personally, that the giver will refrain from eating “factory farmed” meat or eggs, spare a reasonable exception (maybe 3 times a year).
  • A promise, made to me personally, that the giver will refrain from watching, reading, or absorbing news or information from any sources that have tended over the last few years to promote the war over the truth, such as:
    • News Corporation
    • Vivendi
    • Universal
    • Disney
    • AOL / Time Warner
    • Viacom
    • General Electric
  • A promise, made to me personally, that the giver will never comply with unlawful or unconstitutional orders or requests from police, even if it means risking arrest (and to video-record the encounter in question and provide it to me so that my readers can enjoy and learn from it ).
• Material items that will help me to grow, such as:
  • Any goods that will help me to travel and see the country and / or the world.
  • Any musical instruments or supplies for those instruments I already own.
  • An artistic chess board – I already have one but I can always use more.
• That any gift given to me is given with pride, and that conversations with third parties in which the giver recalls the gift are accompanied by an explanation of what good it might have done for the world.