Well, the “Department of Homeland Security” may be trying, but they’re still pretty dense. I was checking to see if I can take my laptop on my flight to Atlanta (I can) and found that I can no longer take on such dangerous taking-over-the-plane things like toothpaste, hand sanitizer, lip gloss, or gel shoe inserts, or even water, but the more traditional tools like corkscrews, metal scissors with pointy ends under 4 inches, pointy knitty needles, screwdrivers, wrenches, and tools under 7 inchs – well, they’re just fine. Yeeeeeh. Read more about it here.

I read something on the internet that I want to post here. It was a speech made by Prof Ramesh Thakur, senior vice rector, UN University, and assistant UN secretary-general in his speech ‘Peace and Social Stability: The Role of the UN in Defeating Terrorism by Promoting Tolerance’. After talking about 9/11 and the US “for us or against us” policy, he brought up an earlier attack seldom talked about:

“In 1985, Air India flight 182 was blown up while flying from Toronto to London. All 329 people aboard were killed. Proportionate to their respective populations, the scale of loss of life due to one terrorist attack for Canada was similar to that of 9/11 for America. And we knew almost immediately who the culprits were: Sikh terrorists seeking independence from India.

“Now consider what Canada did not do. It did not dispatch its military forces to India to drain the swamp of terrorism in Punjab, nor declare a global war on terror, nor demand that Washington carefully screen all Sikh migrants and visitors henceforth. Rather, it increased and improved airport security measures, launched a criminal investigation, and prosecuted the alleged perpetrators in court. The court action failed ultimately, but that is a price we accept in democracies. It is called the rule of law, where prosecution by the government does not entail presumption of guilt and certainty of conviction.

“Yet the menace of Sikh terrorism has more or less disappeared from India as much as in Canada and the Sikhs are valuable and valued members of modern Canadian society steeped in the ethos of multiculturalism.”

Go Canada! God I can’t wait for Bush to get out of office.

*Rant over* (more…)