Last night we left our porch light on in recognition of National Missing Children's Day. We learned about that by being privileged to attend a fund raising event for the Missing Children Society of Canada in Calgary.

The guest speaker was Melissa Hawach who was there to describe her story and her happy ending. While Melissa chided the TV News Guy MC for the media's sensationalizing of her experience, it is a pretty special tale by a woman who clearly crossed a threshold in her quest to get her daughters back. No doubt, Americans will probably be introduced to her story by way of a motion picture or movie-of-the-week but hearing about the mobilization of her will in person was an experience I will always remember.

From Calgary to Australia and into a chaotic Lebanon, Melissa tracked her children while developing a network of friends, supporters and lawyers to help get them back. It wasn't enough. Melissa took us to the edge of her final decision to get the kids back but she does not talk publicly about her controversial choice to go beyond what lawyers can do.

While Melissa was there to describe her extraordinary happy ending she made it clear that every year scores of children are the victims of parental abductions that remain unresolved. Beyond abduction, the Missing Children's Society helps parents seek run-aways and children who have errantly wandered. It's a good cause and worthy of greater support.

Somewhere in the course of writing Canada's history in the 20th century the story changed from "warrior nation" to "peace-keeper". Today as we re-dedicate our great memorial at Vimy in honour of 66,000 who died in the First World War, we also mourn 6 soldiers who died on Easter Sunday in Afghanistan.

Ask an old soldier what he thinks of war and you will get the truth. The horror, the filth, the despair and the simple things that affirm humanity amidst the depths of man's lowest ebb. The soldier will also tell you about honour, duty, mission and the act of being a servant to the civics of justice. Although we have reached a cynical watershed as a society, with our distrust of spin and manufactured fear, there are still reasons for engagement in the desolate heat of an opium infused land.

In the twisted shards of a LAV III our greatest sons and daughters, our hopes, our dedicated and dedications, our vulnerability to those who would hate us, our strength of character, our commitment to a world -- that even in this place -- there is the possibility for a reasonable society. With our guns, our youth, our money, our diplomats, our building of roads and schools, our belief in defending the defenseless, our desire to protect children and advocate for women, we must continue to believe in keeping the peace.

For the 66,000. For the six.

I'm suspicious. This recent item from engadget is setting all kinds of tongues wagging. I on the other hand hear, 'Danger, Danger Will Robinson!'.

News organizations in other countries are starting to quote the story which engadget has sourced from only one spot; forums.somethingawful.com.

Couple the single, unreliable source with the fact that the EXIF tags for "Date Time Original" and "Date Time Digitized" are from January 7, 2004 and I think we have a problem here...

Where is Lenovo's press release? What about an LAX release? Why no local stories in TV or the newspapers?

UPDATE: Well duh... somethingawful.com specializes in hoaxes.

UPDATE 2 (Sept. 21): This is just getting weirder. Tom Krazit of cnet.com assures me that Lenovo has told him that "there was an fire incident at LAX and that their laptop was involved". Brian Humphrey (Firefighter/Specialist, Public Service Officer, Los Angeles Fire Department) at first reported no fire calls but subsequently discovered that(check out the comments):
"One media caller today provided more detail in the way of a date and approximate time, and I discovered our response on Friday, September 15, 2006 at 5:44 PM to Terminal 7 at LAX.
We responded to a 'fire out' in the terminal area involving a personal laptop computer. The apparent fire had been completely extinguished with a dry chemical extinguisher by bystanders prior to our arrival.
There were no injuries.
The LAFD notified custodial staff at LAX to handled the cleanup. Firefighters did not determine the make and model of the device or the cause of the fire."

The original source and the photo anomalies are still very problematic. On top of that, there are not yet any reported corroborating eye-witness accounts from people who are not using pseudonyms. Stay tuned.

UPDATE 3 (Sept. 29, 2006): Lenovo announces a re-call on some R, T and X series notebooks. There are still big questions to be answered about how this story originally broke and got reported but, sadly, I don't think we're going to get the answers. The truth is out there...

Today, a brief story about Dr. Francis Scrimger, a Victoria Cross recipient. Dr. Scrimger was also a personal friend of John McCrae, the writer of In Flanders Fields:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders Fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders Fields.

I Was cleaning out the truck last week and came across a lost CD; Joan Osborne's "Relish". That disc contains one of my favourite pop songs from the past 10 years, the plaintive "One of Us".

You don't have to be religious to get the point of the song.

Staring with abject disbelief at the images from New Orleans over the past week, the song has been playing over and over in my head. Out there are thousands of us.

Do what you can to help.

Many of you access this site by RSS feed, so you won't see the special Amazon.com link for donations to the Red Cross on my home page. Please give generously to one of the many relief agencies that are working in the region. The Center for International Disaster Information has noted that the best thing an individual can do right now is give cash.
As many of you know, Woody Leonhard lives in Phuket, Thailand and thankfully is safe. Our thoughts and hopes are with those in the affected areas.

Had enough of the "cliffhanger" metaphor? Even after all the polls had closed no major media outlets wanted to make the obvious calls on Florida and Ohio. It was a clear demonstration of insecure institutional group-think.

What about the popular vote? Wasn't that supposed to be the litmus test for indicating the true will of the people? Did we hear about that? Were the pundits not watching the results? All in all it was a night of shamelessly poor coverage, abysmal analysis, poor conversation and abject media insecurity. The local & regional feeds that I watched on the satellite were even worse. Mark November 2, 2004 on your calendar -- TV news pronounced clinically dead.

Thomas Barnett's presentation to Pop!Tech -- Emerging Worldviews is now available on-line in several formats at
www.itconversations.com/shows/detail238.html

Barnett represents some of the brightest and most rational thinking on global policy that the U.S. has to offer. His views are illuminating, engaging and point to a strategy for winning the peace against insurgent terrorist enemies. He is erudite, non-isolationist and suprisingly sanguine about the rise of nascent middle powers like the "ABC's" (ie: Argentina, Brazil, Chile). Barnett puts the boot to the notion of America as an empire builder. The U.S. has traditionally sought -- and continues to seek -- stability. Increasingly America is seeing in the global community like-minded "been there, done that" attitudes from most countries in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Where "networks" are free to develop and flourish (ie: trade, entertainment, information, monetary and communication networks) there are no threats to world and American security. While he makes his point with the precision of a military scholar -- which he is -- Barnett has a wrapper of sociology, politics and pragmatism about him that offer encouraging hope about the kind of engaged intellectual debate that has, is and will stir around U.S. military and security policy. Not even Tom Clancy could have envisioned a Jack Ryan as intellectually ripped as this. Listen, think, engage; this is a Podcast peak.