Citizens Electoral Council of Oz

I got some SPAM today from mediareleases@cecaust.com.au which is the Citizens Electoral Council of Australia. This is a group of loonies who believe that they are exempt from the SPAM ACT because they are a political party. Sure, their rubbish is Commerical in nature, but it is UNSOLICITED. That makes it SPAM. They are supporters of Lyndon LaRouche who has been convicted for his past activities. Their wiki page is here and more fun stuff is here

I took mum to the haematologist yesterday for her checkup, and got her blood tested. The blood test results were not too bad, although the platelets were still down a bit. The red and white cell numbers are down a bit - but the platelets are in the 70's whereas 150 is in the normal range. This is an improvement on last tuesday when they were 6, but still a bit low. Mum's kidneys are still not 100% either, but this is a known issue, and mum just needs to keep up her fluids at this stage. The doctor decided to not do any more lumbar puncture chemo for the moment, and has put mum on weekly blood tests just in case. She is thinking that the results are caused by the chemo.

I was due to go to a conference in the USA over the last weekend this month, but given the results I will not be going. The problem is that the conference is west coast USA, and so there is close to 24 hours from catching the first flight to arriving at the hotel at the other end. So if something happened with mum back here it would be a real problem to get back in an emergency - both with the time for the journey and also the availability of flights.

But I will take a little time off - most likely to Fiji and New Zealand. Still working that one out.

2 Clix sues Whirlpool...

To me, as an interstate non-lawyer I have some major issues with the Statement of Claim that was submitted to the Supreme Court.

In the claim at the top of the document, the solicitor claims 'Damages for Injurous Falsehood in the amount of $150,000.00 PER MONTH'.

In the summary of relief, the solicitor is claiming 'Damages for Injurous Falsehood in the amount of $150,000.00'

I am guessing that this little oversignht is going to cost 2 Clix a LOT of money, if they win. [They will not of course, but that is another matter] I suspect that if this actually gets anywhere that the Statement of Claim will be amended.

In addition, the solicitor has failed to show that the comments made are 'False and Malicious'. It is very difficult to prove to a court that a persons PERSONAL OPINION is FALSE. Without proof in any way suggesting that the opinions listed in the document are made up, I suspect that those claims will be thrown out. The problem is that the statements are perported to be both 'False' and 'Malicious'.

I can just see the court case now where the people quoted are asked about the basis of their statements, and the case will be thrown out.

Simon Wright has not published the letters from 2 Clix, and has taken some time to let the people on Whirlpool know. Therefore I suspect that what has been happening is that 2 Clix has been using this court case to attempt to leverage Simon - firstly threatening the court case, and now actually submitting the paperwork. 2 Clix must be really annoyed by now since it has cost them a signicicant amount of money to get to this point. And it will only get worse.

It would appear to me that the lawyer has put in just enough detail to make this threat credible, but not enough to actually hold a hope of winning. That would have required a LOT more work, showing how each statement quoted was False and Malicious. That also suggest that 2 Clix is after the threads being removed, and an undisclosed settlement to make it go away.

In Summary: The solicitor stuffed up and is really only claiming $150K rather than $150K/Month. Also the solicitor has only done enough work to use the claim as a leverage for a financial settlement.

This post relates to THE CHASERS WAR ON EVERYTHING, and how they entered the restricted zone of APEC. Eleven people were arrested when the CHASER comedy team set up a fake motorcade and drove past the security checkpoints, and were only caught when a member of the team got out just near the George W Bush hotel dressed as Osama Bin Laden.

The APEC ACT is an interesting read.

Paragraph 19 is entitled 'Offence: Entering restricted area without special jurisdiction'
It states that 'A person must not, without special justification, enter a restricted area or any part of a restricted area.'. This is really simple. There is only one issue. They defined Special Justification.

Paragraph 37 is entitled 'Special Justification'.
It states that 'A person has a special justification to be in an area if:
(c)the person is required to be in (or pass through) the area for the purposes of the person's employment, occupation, profession, calling, trade or business or for any other work-related purpose'.

Therefore regardless of wether the person had a security pass or not, they were permitted to be in the area because they had a reason to be there because their employer wanted them there. All they need to do is to be able to prove this as part of paragraph 38.

I found a cute Pizza Recipie link