Archive for April 25th, 2009

Border surveillance “effective”: just not by the dictionary definition

Another boat load of asylum seekers has been intercepted of the West Australian coast, and Federal Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus is delighted:

Mr Debus said the successful interception demonstrated the effectiveness of Border Protection Command’s surveillance.

“Our surveillance is strong and targeted and officers from Customs and Border Protection and the Royal Australian Navy are working together to protect Australia from unauthorised arrivals.

Great, three groups of people monitoring our borders and swooping on the people they spot coming near. I would therefore assume that one of these groups spotted the illegal boat…

An oil rig tender vessel had tipped off the Customs and Border Protection hotline about the vessel.

The sighting was then confirmed by a Customs and Border Protection Command Dash 8 aircraft.

Three groups of people, getting paid a bucketload of taxpayer dollars, and it’s an oil rig tender vessel which spots the illegal boat? If this is what Mr. Debus calls effective, perhaps he should check his dictionary:

ef·fec·tive
adj.
1.
a. Having an intended or expected effect.

Perhaps it is effective…if Mr. Debus expects boat to be spotted by third parties rather than the people who are being paid to conduct the surveillance.

It’s no wonder that the boats are flooding in to Australian territory with people like Bob Debus in charge of our border security.

(Apparently using the words “flood” and “boat” in the same sentence makes me part of the “nutjobosphere”…that’s fine by me, because it doesn’t change the fact that I’m right!)

Samuel

9 comments April 25th, 2009 at 08:15pm

Yahoo Geocities being shut down

I note that Yahoo are shutting down Geocities, their free and ad-ridden website hosting and creating service.

As well as a large amount of pure garbage, there is some useful stuff buried amongst the miriad of sites on Geocities, so I hope that Yahoo or somebody else is archiving it somewhere. Yahoo aren’t saying that they will retain any form of archive, and it would be a pity to see some of that data get deleted, but I can understand their decision…I’m sure that they don’t make much money on it, in fact I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if they make a loss on it.

The end of Geocities has reminded me that I have one page on there from a few years back (2005 to be precise) and another related handful of pages on another free hosting service. I’ve been meaning to archive them on this site for a while…I suppose there’s no time like the present.

Samuel

April 25th, 2009 at 07:46am


Calendar

April 2009
S M T W T F S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
2627282930  

Posts by Month

Posts by Category

Login/Logout


Blix Theme by Sebastian Schmieg and modified for Samuel's Blog by Samuel Gordon-Stewart.
Printing CSS with the help of Martin Pot's guide to Web Page Printability With CSS.
Icons by Kevin Potts.
Powered by WordPress.
Log in