News-Record.com

Both here in Greensboro and at Groundhog Ground Zero in Punxsutawey, Pa., groundhogs are calling for an early spring.

I thought that train left the station about the second week of January, but whatever.

I'm not sure if I'd bring this event up ordinarily, but because I know a fair number of veterans stop by here due to recent stories, I thought I'd pass it on:

A portable hard drive that may contain the personal information of up to 48,000 veterans may have been stolen, the Department of Veterans Affairs and a lawmaker said Friday.

An employee at the VA medical center in Birmingham, Ala. reported the external hard drive missing on Jan. 22. The drive was used to back up information on the employee's office computer. It may have contained data from research projects, the department said.

The employee also said the hard drive may have had personal information on some veterans, although portions of the data were protected. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jim Nicholson said that the VA and the FBI are investigating.

Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., said that the personal information of up to 48,000 veterans was on the hard drive and the records of up to 20,000 of them were not encrypted.

No info on the VA home page as of right now. The link to news releases has a 1-paragraph item linking to a full news release, released Friday. (This release day might be coincidence, but it might also have something to do with the fact that a lot of government agencies release unpleasant news on Fridays -- usually late in the afternoon -- because they know the journalists are scrambling to finish up their weekend stories and go home and that they have short attention spans and will have moved on come Monday. There was a "West Wing" episode called "Take Out the Trash Day" that featured this phenomenon.)

Now, this release date, keep in mind, pertains to an event that was first brought to the VA's attention on Jan. 22. I don't know why.

If we don't start automatically encrypting everything on government laptops, we're going to have to stop government laptops from leaving the building. Which, of course, defeats the purpose of having a laptop.

Just sayin'.

There was a whole passel of stuff covered at tonight's meeting that we obviously didn't have room for in the print edition. If you'd like to use this thread as a place to discuss any of it, please jump in with a comment. At the moment I'm tired and going home soon, but before I do, a few quick thoughts:

-- I heard, off the record, before the meeting from a couple of people in the community who saw this event as a desperate reach for relevance by the Guilford Truth and Community Reconciliation Project, which, on the surface, has little connection with what's going on at Guilford College. Perhaps. The number of current or former Guilford students, and others with connections to the Guilford community, who spoke suggest that that's an unfair criticism. So did one of their common themes: that the college, intentionally or through neglect, has failed to provide such a forum on its own.

-- There were a lot of criticisms leveled at the administration tonight. Reporters hate this: Allegations are leveled at a public meeting, near deadline, with little time to try to get any kind of reaction and no time whatever to try to assess the validity of the charges independently. Sometimes people are accurate and sincere; sometimes they're neither. (Full disclosure: Guilford spokesman Ty Buckner and I both attend First Presbyterian Church. He sings in the choir. I, out of an abundance of Christian love for my fellow children of God, do not.) Under those circumstances, we have two choices. Both suck: Report unverified allegations, albeit allegations made by name in a public meeting, or don't tell the public what we saw and heard. I went with Door No. 1. Fortunately, we'll be publishing another edition Thursday, and another Friday, and so on. Also, I hear we have a Web site.

-- One speaker suggested that alcohol -- specifically, underage drinking -- probably played a bigger role in the Jan. 20 fight than has been generally acknowledged.

-- I covered tonight's meeting because I'm covering the GTCRP. I'm not covering the Guilford assault case, although I've pitched in a time or two. Obviously there were some angles tonight that cry out for follow-up. I'll be leaving I've left my recommendations with The Powers That Be before going home tonight. Feel free to add yours, or any other thoughts you have on the meeting, the case, or the larger issues raised by both, in the comments.

UPDATE: I wanted to take the blog owner's prerogative of offering one bit of unsolicited advice. Before I do, I want to make very clear that I did not witness the events at Guilford, have not spoken directly to anyone who did, have not covered that story directly and am not speaking specifically of what happened there when I say the following, which is based on my Scouting experience, my own college experience and a half-dozen years of police reporting as much as anything else:

If you ever see someone hitting someone else in the head with a hard object, it is never a bad idea to call 911 first, then any other authority that might be around. For one thing, it gets paramedics there faster should they be needed. For another, it's a lot easier and more pleasant to clear up a misunderstanding on the spot than to try to jump-start a criminal investigation well after the event.

Just sayin'.

One of the issues raised during and after Tuesday night's public meeting on the Guilford College assault case was reporting a crime: Who should do it, when, how; what the obligations of police are when a crime is reported, and so on.

First, the obligations of the police are pretty clear. And as I noted earlier, the obligations of the victim are just as clear, although the victim's sense of urgency understandably might be mitigated by a more pressing need to, first, ensure survival.

No, it's everyone else I want to ruminate on, and ultimately lecture, because I heard at least one thing that left me feeling pretty grumpy that I think I can talk about without giving anyone a case of the journalistic-ethics vapors.

At Guilford, we have a situation in which an unknown but apparently significant number of people witnessed a fight. In this fight, from all accounts, some people were hitting some other people in the head with something hard -- brick, rock, construction rebar, I don't know, but certainly nothing you could wash your face with.

As anyone who has seen such an assault in real life as opposed to just watching cartoon violence on TV knows, these things never end well. And yet, so far as is known, nobody called 911.

I heard some people say that the culture at Gulford College encourages people to try to deal internally with incidents. That's not unique to Guilford, as I observed. But here's a fact: We have institutions designed to deal with violent felonies. And here's another fact: Private, Quaker-affiliated liberal-arts colleges are not among those institutions, no matter how qualified they might be for other missions. And, finally, here's an opinion, a bit of an elaboration on what I said in the previous thread: If you see someone hit someone else in the head with something hard, you need to contact the type of institution designed to deal with that type of action. That means paramedics with an ambulance, because someone with a head wound can go from woozy but coherent to dead damn quick, and it means a cop with a gun, because someone who already has put a hole in someone's head might well figure he has nothing left to lose.

In short, you need to call 911.

But I also heard something Tuesday night that requires a response, and that was the claim that some people might have been so traumatized by what they saw that they have not yet been able to report what they saw ... to GPD or anyone else.

Mentally, at the time, I rejected that argument both as to its substance and to its implications. After a bit of sleep reflection, I decided that, while that kind of PTSD certainly happens, it still doesn't justify even temporary silence in the real world.

When you were growing up, you probably wanted to be an adult, and so you observed all the conventions and took all the steps that are part and parcel of trying out for the grownup team. And congratulations! You made the team. You've got the jersey. The coach knows your name.

But despite whatever you might have inferred or been told, being on the grownup team isn't a sentence to 50 years of riding pine, even if that's all you want.

With the rights of adulthood, you assume certain obligations. Some are spelled out in the law, like jury duty. Others are less tangibly defined, but no less important.

To continue the bad sports metaphor (the prerogative of every middle-aged man) and bring it into a Quaker context, as much as you might just want to ride the bench, sometimes the spirit, or Spirit, isn't just going to move you, it is going to call your number, pat you on the butt and send you into the game.

If you were there on Jan. 20, you're in the game, the ball has come your way, and I'm pretty sure the Spirit doesn't want to hear you whine about it. I know I don't.

Not to sound like a premature curmudgeon, but right now tens of thousands of soldiers and Marines your age in Iraq don't care how traumatized you might be by what you might have seen, because they're seeing worse. For that matter, many people your age are more badly traumatized by things they experience in this country every day than you were -- they see homicides, suicides, wrecks, child abuse, spousal abuse, industrial accidents, you name it. Many of them never get over what they see. It's awful. I get that. In many cases, there is nothing we can do to prevent experiencing such a thing; in no case is there any real way to prevent the horrible effects even witnessing the experience will have.

Having had a few such folks tell me their stories over the years, I ache for all of them. And believe it or not, I ache for you, too -- IF you have stepped up and gotten in touch with the police, nagged them if you had to, and made sure they understood exactly what you saw, what you do and do not know about what happened on campus on the early morning of Jan. 20, and how they and prosecutors can get back in touch with you when and if necessary until this whole mess is laid out. It isn't just whoever the victims of Jan. 20 were who are counting on you. It's all of us.

Once you have taken that step, then by all means go get counseling or do whatever it is you need to do to mitigate the damage that your experience has done to you. I'm absolutely not being snarky now. Just, please, first go meet that minimum obligation of any grownup, even a newly minted one, who was there that night and saw what happened.

Now, you kids get off my lawn.

Now that I've got all my banners updated (thanks, Sue!), I'll do the plug: ConvergeSouth will be held this year on Oct. 19-20, although it looks like the site that the banners link to won't go live 'til March 1.

Organizers are listing their needs for volunteers here, and signup sheets for sponsors are here. (Just in the interest of full disclosure, the N&R has been a sponsor for the past two years. I presume it will be again, but I do not know whether that is in fact the case and do not have any control over that decision.)

ConvergeSouth is a two-day affair in odd-numbered years. Sue says she and other organizers are now seeking proposals for interactive discussions, demonstrations and how-to sessions in:

1. New media and journalism
2. New creative online models and tools
3. Blogger how-to and blog improvement
4. Music performance (evenings)
5. Original video and film

Having gone back almost entirely to old-fashioned print reporting for most of the past year, and having put my personal blog on indefinite hiatus, I will probably, and blessedly, not be on the agenda. I'm not even going to climb atop Hoggard's piano and wail old rock 'n' roll songs (yes, he's hosting the barbecue again this year).

I hope attendance climbs as a result.

There are rainmakers, and there are snow makers.

Dan Cushing of High Point makes snow, using a snow maker he made. (Got that?) I wrote a bit about it for today's paper. The excellent photo is by Allison Money, one of our fairly new part-timers. She also tipped the newsroom to this story.

After the story ran today, a reader e-mailed to find out how Dan built his machine. I don't give sources' contact info out, so I called Dan to tell him how to get in touch with that reader if he wanted to. During the course of that conversation -- a much less harried one than we had on deadline Monday -- he mentioned that this snow-making gig is quite the hobby these days.

Hmm, I thought. There's been one white Christmas here in my 20 years in town. I'm betting this is news readers could use.

Dan e-mailed me this link to a Yahoo! group on snow making: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Snowcentral/

He cautions that there is a fair amount of off-topic material, but he says the on-topic stuff is very good.

He also suggested a commercial site, SnowatHome.com. I am not mechanical, as we say of the non-engineers in my family, so I would not necessarily know how to evaluate the site. Thus, all the usual disclaimers apply and probably some others I haven't yet thought of.

Finally, Dan said he'd try to dig up the plans from which he built his machine and send them along. If he does, I'll post them as well.

I chatted earlier today with Steve Sumerford of the Greensboro Public Library, which is holding the next Town Hall Meeting on March 11 to discuss the now-defunct Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report on the 1979 Klan-Nazi killings.

Steve sees the library's role as a bit of a balancing act: The library believes this is an important document the community needs to discuss. But it also wants to be an honest broker in any discussion that does occur. And as a part of that, he's struggling with how to get people into the discussion who oppose the report's recommendations, even people who don't believe the report merits attention.

That's a tough nut to crack. Just by suggesting that there be discussion on a particular issue, the library is staking itself out, even if few institutions in this community are better qualified.

But its moderating role is well-established -- and, so far as I know, hsa been generally well-thought-of -- on subjects ranging from the anti-Islamic cartoons published in Danish newspapers to previous One City, One Book discussions. We've been down the path of community discussion before, and to the extent the library has played a role, the community has benefited.

As I blogged at the time, the previous Town Hall meeting in December was populated almost exclusively by people who supported the truth-and-reconciliation process and supported most, if not all, of the report's recommendations. I wondered then whether the discussion wouldn't have been more valuable with other points of view in the room.

Sumerford's wondering the same thing, and he's wrestling with how to make that happen.

Some commenters here and elsewhere have suggested that if you've publicized the event and opened the doors, then you've done all you need to do, that there will always be people whose agenda is to stand outside and lob grenades.

And there will. But in response to that, I'd like to raise four questions:

1) What if you don't want to settle for all you need to do and would rather try to do all you can do?

2) If it's possible to bring the grenade throwers inside and point their grenades back outside -- leaving them to disagree with the people inside who, quite literally, have their backs [and inserting crude metaphor here about camels, tents and urination] while directing the worst they have to offer away from their fellow citizens -- wouldn't that be better for this community?

3) Are those who support this process, if not all the report's findings and recommendations, certain that they can learn nothing from the grenade throwers?

4) And, finally, if you are or have been a grenade thrower thoughtful, if impassioned, critic of the process, the report and/or its findings and have not taken part in public discussions up 'til now, isn't it time you did? Your fellow citizens want to hear from you -- not just on a comment page at Ed's place or wherever.

The event is 4-6 p.m. Sunday, March 11, at the main library, 219 N. Church St. Yes, that's the day of the ACC men's basketball final, but that game starts at 1, so you have no excuse. ;-)

I posted recently about missing/stolen VA laptops containing records of thousands of veterans, most of them unencrypted.

At 6:45 p.m. Friday -- i.e., after most reporters on the East Coast, including yours truly, had gone home for the weekend, this story moved on the Associated Press wire:

WASHINGTON (AP) _ Veterans Affairs Secretary Jim Nicholson has suspended activities at seven specialized research centers [none in N.C. -- Lex] across the country after an unprotected computer hard drive disappeared from one of the facilities in Alabama last month.

In an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press, Nicholson called the department's latest data breach ''tragic'' and ordered the VA's Research Enhancement Award Programs to shut down until they are certified as meeting security standards.

The research centers focus on studies involving large amounts of data. The center in Birmingham, called the Deep South Center on Effectiveness, collects data for improving quality of care.

Writing to VA's top management on Thursday, Nicholson also said the department would begin unannounced inspections at VA sites nationwide.

''It is now clear to me that there are still too many VA employees, both in senior positions and elsewhere, who either still do not comprehend the seriousness of this issue, or who consciously disregard its seriousness,'' he wrote.

Nicholson has come under sharp criticism on Capitol Hill in the past year over a series of computer security failures that put sensitive personal information for millions of veterans at risk.

In the latest incident, a backup hard drive containing data such as Social Security numbers for up to 1.8 million veterans and physicians was reported missing Jan. 22 from a research site in Birmingham, Ala.

Please read this story in Sunday's Washington Post about Walter Reed Army Hospital.

This story raises a complicated set of issues that would be very easy to misunderstand.

While the hospital is a place of scrubbed-down order and daily miracles, with medical advances saving more soldiers than ever, the outpatients in the Other Walter Reed encounter a messy bureaucratic battlefield nearly as chaotic as the real battlefields they faced overseas.

On the worst days, soldiers say they feel like they are living a chapter of "Catch-22." The wounded manage other wounded. Soldiers dealing with psychological disorders of their own have been put in charge of others at risk of suicide.

Disengaged clerks, unqualified platoon sergeants and overworked case managers fumble with simple needs: feeding soldiers' families who are close to poverty, replacing a uniform ripped off by medics in the desert sand or helping a brain-damaged soldier remember his next appointment.

"We've done our duty. We fought the war. We came home wounded. Fine. But whoever the people are back here who are supposed to give us the easy transition should be doing it," said Marine Sgt. Ryan Groves, 26, an amputee who lived at Walter Reed for 16 months. "We don't know what to do. The people who are supposed to know don't have the answers. It's a nonstop process of stalling."

To be scrupulously fair, none -- repeat, none -- of the dozens of veterans I've talked to since beginning reporting on veterans issues in September has complained about the skill or the dedication of the staff at the two VA facilities with which they most often interact, the hospitals at Salisbury and Durham. Not even anonymously.

Some have, however, expressed concern about whether those facilities are getting the financial and administrative support those units need to serve our veterans the way they need and deserve to be served. It appears the same concerns are warranted for the Other Walter Reed.

UPDATE: It's a series, and another installment is here. Hat tip to my colleague Robert Bell for the heads-up.

UPDATE: The head of Walter Reed, Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, says the Post is wrong, lying or both. Well, anything's possible. Really. I'm not being snarky here.

But I'm also not being snarky when I suggest that there are at least two other possible explanations, poor administration or failure to secure adequate resources, either of which fits better with Occam's razor than does Weightman's version of events. Meanwhile, I'm awaiting more info.

Here's some additional information on the conference mentioned in my article in today's N&R.

Submission guidelines: Send abstracts (summaries describing the form and type of work proposed) in Microsoft Word format to Stephen Schulman, assistant professor of philosophy at Elon University, at sschulman@elon.edu by March 12.

Include: Proposed title of the work, author or authors’ name(s), institutional affiliation (if any), e-mail address and phone number.

Possible subjects: Issues arising from the events of Nov. 3, 1979, and their aftermath, including but not limited to justice, the justice system, social activism, race/class issues and government acountability,

Criteria for inclusion: Relevance to intended audience, clarity and substance, with consideration for diversity.

Questions? Contact Stephen Schulman, assistant professor of philosophy, Elon University, sschulman@elon.edu; Spoma Jovanovich, assistant professor of communications studies at UNCG, s_jovano@uncg.edu; or Jill Williams, guest professor at Guilford College, williamsje@guilford.edu.