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Media statement from Cameron Slater on Benjamin Rachinger and the hack of the Standard that that never actually happened
May 9, 2016 8:00 pm • Lauda Finem
by Cameron Slater on May 9, 2016 at 9:52pm
A lot of time has passed since the criminal hacker took the bulk of my emails and Facebook chats as part of a planned conspiracy against the Right. And a significant amount of time has passed since my last public statement about Ben Rachinger and the alleged hacking into The Standard blog.
A lot has happened. A lot continues to happen. And my approach has been to say almost nothing to stop it getting in the way of several police complaints, active investigations and court cases I am directly or peripherally involved in. Mostly as the complainant, I'd like to add.
All of this is connected to Kim Dotcom, to the NZ Police, to the NZ Herald, TV3, Colin Craig and several people I can still not name due to other court commitments. But the Ben Rachinger "The Standard hack" issue has now resolved itself to the point where it can be talked about with some degree of isolation without getting in the way of the other issues before the authorities.
Today, with the lifting of the Policerequested and Courtordered suppression, I am taking the opportunity to do two things.
I'm going to make a number of factual statements today in this release, and I am going to write a number of articles that will delve into some of the detail of what has developed. The first will be published on whaleoil.co.nz later today.
Ben and I worked together for a considerable amount of time. During that period, I understood that we were trying to find out more information as to who was behind the hacking of my emails and data.
To discover information that could assist the NZ Police and hopefully to prosecute the people involved in the planning, the hacking, the person that paid for it, the people that distributed the information and the people who made money from it.
For months Ben and I were on the same team. Or so I thought. I am a sucker for people that are broken and need help, and Ben fitted and I believe still fits that category. His personal problems are publicly documented by Ben himself elsewhere, but I wasn't aware of some of these at the time. As part of our working relationship, he did regularly claim financial hardship, and I even attempted to organise regular work for him. All this is already on public record.
At some point, Ben stopped being an ally, and turned on me. It may very well have been his plan to do so from the beginning, but when I was paying him to assist in doing research and tracking information based on his claims of being connected to the "hacking scene", he obviously kept that relationship functional as I was a source of money to fund his expensive needs.
My state of mind at the time is relevant here. The world was out to get me. I'd been the subject of a three month continuous barrage of political and media attention, most of it with the intention to judge me in the Court of Public Opinion to have broken the law as a "Dirty Politics" operator that works with politicians, media, industry, public relations, spin doctors and interested individuals.
Media would camp out on my doorstep. There were threats to my life, my family's life and well being, and I quietly moved to a different place to live. One of those threats has subsequently resulted in someone being convicted and having been deprived of his liberty. This was all very real to me. I definitely had fallen into a siege mentality.
During this period, media from the NZ Herald and TV3 specifically, but others generally, were hounding me and trying to frame the argument that I had done something illegal when I worked as a practitioner of the Dark Political Arts.
Few people will have sat through a 7 hour interview without a break, alone, facing several highly skilled professional interrogators with long backgrounds in New Zealand's security services, where they hammer you on every detail, repeatedly. Like a criminal in fact.
As we know now, nothing that happened under the guise of what has now become known as Dirty Politics broke any laws. People may not like the tactics, but there was nothing to charge anyone over. Nothing. Not just me. Anyone.
That didn't stop my political opponents, as it shouldn't. I would have done the same to them. But where things got out of hand was that certain people working for the media also joined the attempt to destroy me, my friends, my contacts and my network.
People have lost their jobs. Employers were rung and scared with onesided information. A good Minister lost her job. Others have been hurt financially and reputationally.
We all know about the game of Politics, but following a criminal attempt to subvert an election, to have certain elements in media use their employers' and private resources to attempt to destroy me, my family, my friends and colleagues was a whole new low.
It is with this back story that I was isolated, angry and deeply resentful at the hypocrisy of media who were on the one hand claiming all the rights, protections and expectations of being journalists for themselves and Mr Hager, but none of those applied to me only because I was and remain a commercial threat and am deeply disliked for being effective at what I do.
Additionally, I was and remain intensely resentful of the usual commentators on the left and in the media that had made it their personal project to destroy me – professionally and personally.
Destroying me was the ultimate objective that started with that meeting where a plan was made to put so much pressure on, that I might even take my own life. So it was stated at the time. And credit where it is due, some people walked out of that meeting at that stage. They knew it had gone too far.
But that was the world I lived in at the time. The pivotal point was when Ben Rachinger told me he had access to parts of The Standard blog that aren't public. I always suspected The Standard and the Labour Party to have formal ties, and it would prove they too did exactly the same as what National and I stood accused of: play politics.
It is important that you understand the sequence of events. Ben has been extremely vocal on the Internet and with the help of TV3, and none of his claims have been publicly rebutted.
Today, that changes.
I did not order the hacking of The Standard blog. Ben told me he already had access to some data he obtained from The Standard. Parts of our conversation surrounding that have subsequently been released by Ben, but it is incomplete, out of sequence and it recasts certain facts in a context that simply isn't true.
Please keep in mind that those incorrect and out of sequence cherry picked facts were surrounded by a narrative spun by Ben, and then amplified and misrepresented by hostile bloggers, media and especially Ben's champions at TV3.
Ben also told me he was working together with Manukau police on tracking down Rawshark. He has stated as much on TV3 when they ran their extended story on him.
This was a huge validation point for me. He would regularly chat about what he was doing in a general sense, or that his police handlers were in the room with him while they were trying to trick certain people in "hacking" chat rooms to give up information by using Ben's self proclaimed social engineering skills. It was Ben typing, but the police were asking the questions and writing down the answers.
Please keep that in mind. I believed what Ben was up to was part of a police sanctioned activity up to that point.
When, as part of working together with police, Ben dangled what I thought was hard proof of The Standard being complicit with working together with Rawshark, at that point, I made a mistake. I thought he had come across it as part of his work with the Police, and he was giving me a sneaky glimpse.
I was so eager to finally make some progress against those that I know have been involved in the larger conspiracy against me personally, that I made the mistake of wanting to see what Ben said he had access to.
In hindsight, it is all so obvious now. Ben wouldn't let me see it unless I paid him for it. I wasn't paying for anything I hadn't seen.
It should have stopped there. But I wanted it too much. So Ben sent some samples.
These samples, he claimed were what he obtained from The Standard. At that stage I was so extremely excited. It clearly fingered at least one individual that I believed to be involved. I was on the hook, and Ben was reeling the line in. I could see real justice coming my way.
I needed something to go my way so badly.
Ben wanted $5,000 for what he described as The Standard data he held. That's not the sort of money I have access to at the drop of a hat, especially as Ben had been regularly requesting and receiving a living wage from me already. I needed to organise a sponsor to assist.
I wanted to see a little more, because most of what he provided was just encrypted and inaccessible. It could have been anything. (In the end, it proved to be exactly that).
Ultimately, Ben didn't produce anything more and the whole relationship turned sour as my critical thinking and suspicions finally took control over my basic need to get some progress against "Team Rawshark". All money was now cut off, and I ceased to be of use to Ben. This is when he turned. Or at least, this is when the next phase of his plan to destroy me was initiated.
Unfortunately, at that stage, I had been dragged across the line, and I had committed the offence of "Attempting to access a computer for a dishonest purpose".
The owner of The Standard laid a police complaint that I had asked for and paid for a hack into their computer system based on Ben's public accusations. That resulted in both Ben and I being questioned by NZ Police.
I handed over all the information, all the emails, and even an encrypted phone with the password. Police could see it all. More importantly, they could see it in the right sequence and in full context, something that Ben and TV3 had carefully crafted in public to appear something quite different.
In the end, Police reached the conclusion that I'd been stupid rather than a hardened criminal. I wanted what Ben said to be true so much, that I stepped over the line. And Ben, credit where it is due, created the trust, then the irresistible bait, and then he managed to use my feelings of anger and injustice against me.
Both Ben and I were charged.
The police insisted on full suppression because they didn't want the media to blow this thing sky high. Police were aware that Ben and TV3 had been working handinhand for some time, not just as a source and journalist, but also as a security consultant. The police wanted the process up to this point to be allowed to progress without it turning into a media circus.
Hence the suppression request.
This did leave me in an interesting position of having crusaded against name suppression and actually benefiting from name suppression, something that insiders found hard to stomach.
So here's the central core of the whole situation: Ben never hacked The Standard, and I never ordered the hack.
Unfortunately for me, the law doesn't see it that way. The law says that making arrangements to have a crime committed is punishable exactly the same as if you committed the crime yourself. Even if it didn't happen. And especially if your partner in the fictitious crime is busy defrauding you by making you believe something that isn't true. The law is somewhat unkind that way.
Ben may not have hacked The Standard, but he did create and/or provide documents with the intent to convince me that he had. And based on those documents, I got conned into discussing payment to see the rest, which at the beginning I believed actually existed. You have no idea how much I wanted to believe it was all real. Well, perhaps you do.
In my tortured mind, there was little difference to that and what Hager had done. Take hacked information, publicise it, and the public interest would outweigh the fact that a line was crossed.
As I, and now you, know, somehow the standards that are applied to Mr Hager are different to those that I have faced. But I have I accepted that I had gone too far.
Although this was a huge event in my life, to the NZ Police this was humourous more than it was the crime of the century. From their perspective they had a journalist and a conman winding each other up about a few fake files. Both of the parties allegedly broke the law.
Both got hurt, and both would clearly not do the same stupid thing again.
Both Ben and I were therefore offered diversion. Adult Diversion is a scheme where people who have strayed on the wrong side of the law, who have no history of doing so, show contrition and are highly unlikely to do that again are offered to carry out a number of public and personal tasks in exchange for having their charge wiped.
Part of my diversion was to undergo professional counselling to ensure the court knows that I understand the rights and wrongs and to give me appropriate coping strategies if I ever find myself in a similar situation. (Let's hope not – the last two years surely can never happen twice?)
Diversion allows for my mistake to go unrecorded officially. So officially I don't have a conviction. I do understand that this is a practical way to give people like me a clean slate to ensure I never make a similar mistake. But it doesn't mean I'm not guilty of wanting to use data that I believed to have come from The Standard to expose my opponents and to save myself in the process. I did it the wrong way. I let myself down, and I let my supporters down. For that I am truly sorry.
Ben on the other hand has refused diversion. It is not for me to speculate what his reasoning is behind this. Ben continues to be a man with many demons, and I am aware he feels slighted by the NZ Police and even the Minister of Police, who rather interestingly, in the meantime, is Judith Collins. (You couldn't make this stuff up!)
I know that Media and TV3 specifically have worked very hard to make sure that Ben can tell his story to the world. The story goes much further than the one I've told you today. Ben alleges that he's a victim of Police misconduct and high level political interference. He's got proof, apparently, and will argue his points in court in cases other than mine.
As far as I understand it, Ben has taken the position that he is not guilty of the charge leveled against him (Obtaining by deception). I guess that now that the suppression orders have lapsed, you will get to see more of that in the media, including Ben's reasoning behind refusing diversion and going on this particular path. As I understand it, he believes that trapping me in a crime was part of what Police asked him to do, and as a result, he should not face the consequences of breaking the law himself.
I will follow these developments with keen interest, as I can no longer tell what parts of Ben's journey are based on truth, and the parts that have been carefully crafted. First to continue the Dirty Politics attack against me, and subsequently the huge mess he's created trying to justify and extricate himself.
I realise my statement today will raise more questions than it has answered, and media specifically will be trying to get hold of me for interviews. As I consider some journalists and reporters hostile and to some degree complicit in the Rawshark hack, Hager book and Whaledump fallout, I am not likely to be on TV or on Radio to talk about this. Instead, you can read the articles as they appear on my blog.
If media insist on wanting to contact me, please consider emailing your questions, and I'll review your request on a case by case basis.
To close, I'd like to thank the NZ Police for their work. In the end, I forced them into a corner where the law required a charge to be laid. And that was my fault alone. I'd like to thank my family, my support crew and my ever so loyal Whaleoil readers. Who knows where all this could have ended up if it wasn't for your support.
Today, a new chapter starts. A chapter where I start fighting back in public, rather than continue to suffer the uncontested lies perpetrated by my political opponents and aided and abetted by personally motivated, well resourced and complicit media.
My first article on what happened will be published on whaleoil.co.nz later today. — end —
Cam Slater
Editor – Whaleoil cam@whaleoil.co.nz
This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercialShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Tags: Ben Rachinger, Cameron Slater, Dirty Politics, Greg Presland, Keith Ng, Lynn Prentice, Matthew Dentith, Peter Aranyi, Rawshark, The Standard
Categorised in: Editorial, New Zealand Police, Party Political Corruption

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Micheal O'Siadhail ( ; born on 12 January, 1947) is an Irish poet. Among his awards are The Marten Toonder Prize and The Irish American Culture Institute Prize for Literature.

Early life

Micheal O'Siadhail was born into a middle-class Dublin family. His father, a chartered accountant, was born in County Monaghan and worked most of his life in Dublin, and his mother was a Dubliner with roots in County Tipperary. Both of them are portrayed in his work in several poems such as "Kinsmen" and "Promise".
From the age of twelve, O'Siadhail was educated at the Jesuit boarding school Clongowes Wood College, an experience he was later to describe in a sequence of poems "Departure" (The Chosen Garden). At Clongowes he was influenced by his English teacher, the writer Tom McIntyre, who introduced him to contemporary poetry. At thirteen he first visited the Aran Islands. This pre-industrial society with its large-scale emigration had a profound impact on him. His earlier work reflects this tension between his love of his native Dublin and his emotional involvement with those outlying communities and which features in the sequence "Fists of Stone" (The Chosen Garden).

Career

Micheal O'Siadhail studied at Trinity College Dublin (1964–68) where his teachers included David H. Greene and Máirtín Ó Cadhain. He was elected a Scholar of the College and took a First Class Honours Degree. His circle in Trinity included David McConnell (later professor of genetics), Mary Robinson and David F. Ford (later Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University). O'Siadhail subsequently embarked on a government exchange scholarship and studied folklore and Icelandic at the University of Oslo. He has retained lifelong contacts with Norwegian friends and sees Scandinavian literature as a major influence.

In 1970 he married Bríd Ní Chearbhaill, who was born in Gweedore in County Donegal. She was for most of her life a teacher and later headmistress in an inner-city Dublin primary school until her retirement in 1995 due to Parkinson's disease. She has been a central figure in O'Siadhail's oeuvre, celebrated in the sequence "Rerooting" in The Chosen Garden and in Love Life, which is a meditation on their lifelong relationship. One Crimson Thread travels with the progression of Bríd's Parkinson's Disease. Bríd died on 17 June 2013.

For seventeen years, O'Siadhail earned his living as an academic; firstly as a lecturer at Trinity College (1969–73) where he was awarded an MLitt in 1971, and then as a research professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. During these years he gave named lectures in Dublin and at Harvard University and Yale University and was a visiting professor at the University of Iceland in 1982. In 1987 he resigned his professorship to devote himself to writing poetry which he described as "a quantum leap".

He served as a member of the Arts Council of the Republic of Ireland (1987–93), of the Advisory Committee on Cultural Relations (1989–97), and was editor of Poetry Ireland Review. He was the founding chairman of ILE (Ireland Literature Exchange). As a founder member of Aosdána (Academy of Distinguished Irish Artists) he is part of a circle of artists and has worked with his friend, the composer Seóirse Bodley, the painters Cecil King and Mick O'Dea, and in 2008 he gave a reading as part of Brian Friel's eightieth birthday celebration.

He represented Ireland at the Poetry Society's European Poetry Festival in London in 1981 and at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1997. He was writer-in-residence at the Yeats Summer School in 1991 and writer-in-residence at the University of British Columbia in 2002.

He is now married to Christina Weltz, who is a native of New York, and assistant professor of surgical oncology at Mount Sinai. They reside in New York.

In 2018, Micheal was included in The Tablet magazine's ′Fifty Minds That Matter′ – fifty men and women who are ″adding some Catholic salt to the contemporary cultural soup″. Included on this list is Pope Francis, Martin Scorsese and Bruce Springsteen.

During his years as an academic, O'Siadhail, writing under the Irish spelling of his name, published works on the linguistics of Irish and a textbook for learners of Irish.

Content and context

David F. Ford points out in Musics of Belonging (Carysfort Press, Dublin 2007) how "beside the new architectonics since the move to full-time writing there has also been an alternation between more personal and more public themes".

Ford lists the characteristic themes in O'Siadhail's work which emerge from early on as: "despair, women, love, friendship, trust, language, school, vocation, music city life, science, Irish and other cultures and histories". He adds that "there is a wrestling for meaning, with no easy solutions – both the form and the content are hard-won". Several critics have highlighted how O'Siadhail uses a vast variety of classic forms including sonnets, terza rima, villanelles, haikus etc. alongside an array of new intricate forms as befits his themes.

His work has been compared by some commentators to Dante, John Milton and Patrick Kavanagh but most often to John Donne. Recent criticism has drawn attention to the depth and range of his intellectual engagements. Mary O'Donnell traced the influence of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in A Fragile City and the academic and critic Eugene O'Brien, editor of The Irish Book Review, described his work as "that rare combination of the intellectual and the emotional".

Development
The trajectory in O'Siadhail's work first moves beyond the sense of despair which haunted his youth, through the collections of once-off poems into the architectonics of his larger thematic books.

In 1978, O'Siadhail published his first poetry collection The Leap Year (originally written in Irish), which was a meditation on healing and nature set against an urban background. This was followed in 1980 by Rungs of Time (originally in Irish) which in an almost Edda-like style announced many of the characteristic themes that would dominate his work; and in 1982 Belonging (the last of this trio originally written in Irish) emphasised, by its title, relationships as a major theme. There were two more collections which contain a few of his best known poems, Springnight in 1983 and The Image Wheel in 1985, before he went full-time and began a series of books based on broad themes.

The Chosen Garden, which appeared in 1990, he himself described as "an effort to face my own journey, to comprehend and trace one's own tiny epic". In 1992 he published Hail! Madam Jazz: New and Selected Poems which includes the new sequence The Middle Voice. In 1995 came A Fragile City, which is a meditation in four parts on the theme of trust. Our Double Time, published three years later in 1998, explores the liberation of facing human finitude in a way that allows a greater intensity of living. Then in 2002 The Gossamer Wall was published. It evokes the Holocaust from its origins to its aftermath in a book-length sequence of stark intensity and was shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize. In Love Life in 2005, O'Siadhail reflects on and rejoices in a long marriage. This was followed in 2007 by Globe, which ponders the dynamics of history in a fast-changing world, its tragedies and achievements as well as its potential.

Bibliography

Books
Poetry
1978: The Leap Year/An Bhliain Bhisigh (An Clóchomar, Dublin )
1980: Rungs of Time/Runga (An Clóchomhar, Dublin )
1982: Belonging/Cumann (An Clóchomhar, Dublin)
1985: Springnight (Bluett, Dublin)
1990: The Image Wheel (Bluett, Dublin)
1990: The Chosen Garden (Dedalus, Dublin)
1992: Hail! Madam Jazz : New and Selected Poems including The Middle Voice (Bloodaxe, Newcastle upon Tyne)
1995: A Fragile City (Bloodaxe, Newcastle upon Tyne 1995)
1998: Our Double Time (Bloodaxe, Newcastle, upon Tyne)
1999: Poems 1975–1995 (Bloodaxe, Newcastle upon Tyne)
2002: The Gossamer Wall (Time Being Books (North American publisher) and Bloodaxe, Tarset)
2005: Love Life (Bloodaxe, Tarset)
2007: Globe (Bloodaxe, Tarset)
2010: Tongues  (Bloodaxe, Tarset)
2014: Collected Poems (Bloodaxe, Tarset)
2015: One Crimson Thread (Bloodaxe, Tarset; Baylor University Press in US)
2018: The Five Quintets (Baylor University Press, US)

Linguistics and language pedagogy
1978: Téarmaí tógálá agus tís as Inis Meáin (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies)
1983: (with Arndt Wigger) Córas Fuaimeanna na Gaeilge (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies)
1988: Learning Irish (Yale University Press)
1989: Modern Irish: Grammatical Structure and Dialectal Variation (Cambridge University Press)

Limited editions

1989 Four Poems (with artist Cecil King) Editions Monica Beck

About O'Siadhail and his work

2007: The Musics of Belonging: The Poetry of Micheal O'Siadhail Ed. Marc Caball and David F. Ford, Carysfort Press, Dublin
2008: A Hazardous Melody of Being: Seóirse Bodley's Song Cycles on the Poems of Micheal O'Siadhail Edited by Lorraine Byrne Bodley, Carysfort Press, Dublin
2009: An Unexpected Light: Theology and Witness in the Poetry and Though of Charles Williams, Micheal O'Siadhail and Geoffrey Hill, David C. Mahan, Pickwick Publications Eugene

Works set to music

1987: The Naked Flame, poem suite (music: Seóirse Bodley) RTÉ commissioned for performance and broadcasting
1993: Summerfest poem suite (Music: Colman Pearce) RTÉ commissioned for performance and broadcasting
2000: Earlsfort Suite song cycle (Music: Seóirse Bodley) commissioned for Irish Government Department of Arts, the Gaeltacht, Heritage and the Islands as part of the Millennium Frozen Music celebration
2000: A Fall set by Dan Tucker, commissioned by the Chicago Humanities Festival,
2002: Dublin Spring, poem suite (music: James Wilson) commissioned for performance.
2006: Twee gedichten van Micheal O'Siadhail for Choir 2006 by Kees van Ersel
2007: Squall set by Seóirse Bodley

Discography

The Naked Flame, poem suite (music: Seóirse Bodley) recorded by Aylish E. Kerrigan accompanied on piano by the composer Seóirse Bodley and available from Ein Klang, Christophestaße, Stuttgart 70178
Cosmos from Hail! Madam Jazz recorded by Helen Shapiro on Jazz Poetry ABM

References

External links
 Personal homepage
 Page at Bloodaxe Books
 Page at Timebeing
 Page at Aosdána

Academics of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies
Irish poets
1947 births
Living people
People educated at Clongowes Wood College
Alumni of Trinity College Dublin
Scholars of Trinity College Dublin
21st-century Irish poets

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'Arrow' Recap 'Shifting Allegiances'
Published on April 27th, 2018 | Updated on April 27th, 2018 | By FanFest
You know those episodes that keep you saying 'OMG!' the entire time? Well, this was certainly one of those episodes. I have to say, there was some stellar performances this week by both Paul Blackthorne and Katie Cassidy. Although Black Siren is a character I am not 100% sure as to whether I love or hate her, the Lance family is one that I hold near and dear to my heart. (Seriously though, Quentin must make it through the series!)
'Shifting Allegiances' kicks off with Oliver confronting a member of the Bratva in Russia, asking for a favor. Rene returned home after a month of being in the hospital. He states that he is ready to take on Ricardo Diaz, and that New Team Arrow is back in action. Diggle, at ARGUS, gives a briefing to a group of recruits about how they are going to track down Ricardo Diaz. Elsewhere, Ricardo Diaz meets with Black Siren and tells her that he wants to meet with Lance himself, since his is the new mayor, – to lay down some ground rules rather than Black Siren herself. Oliver meets with Anatoly and asks to speak with him. Oliver informs Anatoly that he fixed the relationship between the Bratva and Anatoly in Russia and that Anatoly can go home. Rather than having a heart to heart conversation, Anatoly struck Oliver with a taser – knocking him out.
Arrow/The CW
Anatoly ties Oliver to a chair and tells him that he is foolish if he thinks that he can take on Diaz by himself without a team and even though he is thankful for what Oliver did, he cannot betray Diaz. At the NTA bunker, the trio narrow down multiple ways to track down Diaz. They figure out he must be working with an older supplier called 'The Scorpions' to sneak illegal items and large shipments into the city. Elsewhere, Lance meets Black Siren at a Chinese Restaurant – one that was a favorite of his, Laurels and Sara's back in the day. She whispers an apology to him, just as Diaz walks in. He presents Lance with an executive order demanding a private sale of a piece of land. Lance refuses to sign, and Diaz and Black Siren both leave the restaurant. Rene, Dinah and Curtis get a bead on 'The Scorpions' and track them to their headquarters. They discover an illegal shipments of M4's and engage in a firefight with 'The Scorpions' crew – led by a member of the Quadrant. NTA gets overwhelmed, and they are eventually rescued by Diggle and some ARGUS agents.
Back at the NTA bunker, the team gets a visit from both Diggle and Lance. Lance informs them of Diaz's visit, and that he asked for a piece of land that included a building that would be large enough for the Quadrant to store all of their illegal materials. Oliver, still chained to a chair, tells Anatoly that he is making a mistake and that Diaz is going to get him lose when Diaz no longer has a use for him. At City Hall, Black Siren meets with Lance and begs him to sign the order so that Diaz won't kill him. Lance still refuses.
Diggle and Rene have a heart to heart about how Rene keeps flashing back to how he almost died – and how it is affecting his ability to fight. Lance heads home and talks to Black Siren. They come to a mutual agreement and they will do whatever it takes to protect each other. NTA and Diggle face off against the Quadrant leader and the scorpions, and halt their transport operations. Anatoly brings Oliver down to Diaz, and Diaz begins beating up Oliver while he is chained. Anatoly steps in and tells Diaz that it is the work of a coward to beat up a chained man. Diaz orders Oliver to be unchained, and states that whoever gets thrown down to the ground first has to leave Star City. After a brutal fight, Oliver gains the upper hand. Oliver begins choking Diaz, demanding he tap out. Instead Diaz cheats, and stabs Oliver in the gut with a knife. Diaz walks away, while Anatoly watches with a hint of remorse.
Anatoly patches up Oliver, and states that all he wanted was to see was which one would actually fight with honor. He tells Oliver he has a plan to get Oliver out of the city but before he gets a chance to act on it, one of Diaz men comes and asks Oliver to follow him.
Black Siren comes in to see Diaz, bringing the executive order he had asked for. He says he didn't even care about the order, he was testing Lance's loyalty. Diaz tells Oliver that he changed his mind and doesn't want Oliver to leave the city anymore, but that he will instead stay for '25 to life'. He has the dirty cops arrest Oliver, and rigs any chances of Oliver getting his bail revoked.
Arrow will return next week on Wednesday, May 3rd 2018 at 9PM/EST on The CW.
Julia Valenti
Julia recently published her first novel, titled; Anomic. She is currently co-authoring a novel called 'Snow Falls'. She has a B.A in Communications with concentrations in Professional Writing and Public Relations. She is also in the United States Army Reserves as a Military Police Officer, and is currently in the process of going back to school for her Masters Degree in Business. When she isn't writing, she is co-owner of a film production studio called 'Valentine Productions LLC' and she frequently spends her weekends acting in films, or being a stuntwoman.
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Anderson: When did we stop looking to the stars?
R. Bruce Anderson
Ledger correspondent
The National Science Foundation announced last week that the Arecibo Observatory (aka the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center) would be losing its main telescope and close.
Arecibo has been one of the longest-running skywatching operations – it was built in 1963. The main dish is 350 meters wide – and sent the first interstellar messages back in 1973, hoping to get an echo from other sentient beings. The Journal Nature informs us that "It has also done pioneering work in exploring many phenomena, including near-Earth asteroids and the puzzling celestial blasts known as fast radio bursts. All those lines of investigation have now been shut down for good, although limited science will continue at some smaller facilities on the Arecibo site".
"For good"?
The dish was so damaged by earthquakes, underfunded maintenance and general disrepair that a team sent to look it over said simply that it could no longer be considered safe. Selah.
Arecibo is a big cancellation dot in a very disturbing historical pattern.
NASA had a SETI program until 1999: "SETI" stands for "Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence," and by 1999 it was no longer a priority – too outlandish, too "science fiction-ey", no "practical application." The space shuttle program closed on Aug. 31, 2011. A date that, for many Floridians, will live in infamy.
Private enterprise has taken up the torch of space travel, but it is, because of the nature of private enterprise, mostly concerned with the commercial potential – space tourists, launching TV satellites. The sheer economy of scale, to say nothing of the purpose, means that such initiatives must, de facto, be a feeble replacement for a serious space program. The last administration's contribution, Space Force, has a military emphasis (overtones of "Team America") and no portfolio, so far, for pure research. While the international space station hangs on, it is only as safe as its funding.
We've been distracted. We're out of the habit. We're no longer interested.
Hogwash. We've simply not been inspired lately to look up.
My home institution has just launched into a massive project to renovate, repair and make operational the only planetarium designed and built by American architectural icon Frank Lloyd Wright. We had help: a big check from a very generous anonymous donor. The federal government kicked in grants – a big "thank you" is in order for Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, Sen. Rick Scott, R-Florida, and Rep. Ross Spano, R-Dover, who enthusiastically backed the project – and the construction was off and running.
Surely, some of this was due to the historical nature of the project, but a lot more of it had to do with the fact that for generations, local school children, shuttled from all over the county, had been astonished and deeply stirred by the ideas generated by the workings of the universe. Some may have gone on to work at NASA – or Arecibo.
The issue is not even one of finding aliens (cool as that would be) or spotting a potential gold mine on an asteroid: it is in finding (and feeding) our unending human curiosity. Reviving the space program – and its attendant cosmological research – should be a policy that crosses party lines.
When President Kennedy started the massive ramp up of the U.S. space program in 1963, he was responding, in part, to an aggressive science blitz by our old competitors, the Russians, who had fired a shot across our bow with Sputnik. But he was also after something else.
Kennedy realized that the country was at a crossroads, with a new generation coming on strong, smart and often science-oriented, who were curious about what lay beyond the confines of earth. And he sought to capture and direct that hope and energy.
We can do the same.
It is my understanding that the Chinese are planning a moon shot. Maybe that will get us up off our collective posteriors to demand a return to space – for all of the right reasons.
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Well, if you care, you long since know that tweet won the American Dialect Society's WOTY last night and google won Word of the Decade. Ben Zimmer's post on the Log is the obvious place for more, and the ADS list has some discussion too. The event was, obviously, being discussed on freaking twitter during the discussions. Opponents of tweet had good arguments — like Eric Raimy's that all supporting comments were disqualified: over 140 characters. But it was noted that google was a wise choice: They can fund the field. Yeah, out of their petty cash.
Most like to succeed is twenty ten as a pronunciation of this year. As noted, the ADS may have finally picked a word in that category that will succeed. Who knows. Most euphemistic was hiking the Appalachian Trail.
I wasn't terribly disappointed on most counts ... the interjection fail! is useful. It was slightly surprising maybe that the -er of birther and tenther didn't do better. Still when the editor of American Speech starts his comments with "now, I like a good suffix, but ..." you figure it's going down in flames. I did want to see teabagger win something. Oh well.
The session played off of PETA's sea kitten (new name for 'fish') a bunch, but that's kinda thin material for humor.
In other news, quasi-official meme of the conference appears to be "will X for beer". Pass it on.


a couple of weeks ago i made these cute matching boy and girl cakes for a combined birthday party based on the HiPP little people bird invitation. clever mum alexandra put together such a sweet party including some gorgeous tags and tableware by sambellina. here are some more lovely details...!
So simple and lovely! I love the white with pops of soft color. Invites are so great for inspiration, especially when you can pull it off as elegantly as this!
Oh my god! This is so perfect! LOVE it!
I like so much ^^ good job..
OMG so cute! Simple and sweet, exactly my taste.
This party is absolutely gorgeous! The cake you made are adorable. This is the first time I saw a boy and girl combined birthday party and it is so cute!! It was very inspiring to know that you can actually make a very stylish, beautiful, boy and girl birthday party.
Adorable cakes!! What did you use to make the details on the cake, the tree, birdhouse, number etc.? Modeling Chocolate?
super cute boy + girl suerhero party!


Vic Gundotra's resignation has cast doubt on the future of Google Plus, the social networking site he launched in 2011. But despite forecasts of doom, the survival of Orkut suggests Google won't close it down.
Following Vic Gundotra's resignation as Google's senior vice president of social, the TechCrunch website claimed -- and Google denied -- that Google+ Is Walking Dead. Gundotra was responsible for launching G+ in 2011, but it remains to be seen whether his departure will change anything. After all, Google first entered the social networking market with Orkut at almost exactly the same time as Facebook. While Orkut's early success was followed by a decline into irrelevance, Google still hasn't closed the service*. Unlike G+, Orkut really is an example of the "walking dead".
But there are certainly reasons for concern. Gundotra spent most of his career at Microsoft (15 years from 1991) and there's no obvious reason why he should quit Google after only seven years… or not if G+ was doing well. (If he's been headhunted to run a rival company, that would be different.) There's also the fact that G+ will now be run by David Besbris, who is currently Google's VP of engineering, not some hot-shot hired from Facebook. Whatever Besbris's merits, which are no doubt many, this sends out the message that G+ is now an engineering management problem rather than a social networking challenge.
Google co-founder Larry Page wrote on G+ that "Vic built Google+ from nothing. There are few people with the courage and ability to start something like that". However, he may have been the wrong man at the wrong time. All Gundotra's moves came straight out of the old -- very old -- Microsoft playbook.
Gundotra's G+ started out as a slow, bloated website, it attempted to gain users by compulsion -- locking G+ to YouTube comments , Gmail and other Google properties -- and it tried to enforce the use of real names. (Yes, amusingly enough, Vic's real name is Vivek.) All of these were unpopular with many users, and according to another TechCrunch post, some Googlers. Danny Crichton, a former Google intern, writes that "Due to this integration, much of it forced, the culture around social at Google had become deeply poisonous by the time I had started. I still remember talking to a member of the Picasa team who told me to 'f*** off' when I asked about integrating Google+ into the product. He was hardly the only one, as any number of company-wide emails from engineers could attest."
Facebook, the world's most successful social network, is now heading in the opposite direction by targeting mobile users with smaller, separate apps. Of course, some of these have been bought in, such as Instagram and WhatsApp, but the normally-acquisitive Google failed to buy them. With trendy apps such as Secret providing anonymity, it won't be a surprise if Facebook provides that feature, too.
As for the timing, that was in part enforced by earlier Google failures such as Orkut, Wave and Buzz. However, G+ arrived when more users were starting to worry about their privacy and about being tracked online. And it was patently obvious that G+'s main purpose was to increase the amount of personal, identifiable information it held on everybody. Perhaps Google was worried because it didn't have the vast stores of personal data that users freely provide to Facebook. However, Google was already running the web's biggest tracking system, so making it even bigger was unlikely to have much appeal.
Putting all your eggs in one basket is as risky today as it was when IBM or Microsoft dominated IT. Google isn't significantly different from either of those, unless you count having even more grandiose plans for taking over the world (Google Glass, self-driving cars, robots etc).
One of the problems with G+ is that it's almost impossible to know how well it is succeeding, or how badly it's failing. If you make a YouTube comment, respond via a Gmail email, use a Hangout or merely click a +1 button, are you really using G+? (There's no reason why Hangouts should be bundled in with G+.) It's far from being a ghost town, but it's nowhere near Facebook's "1.28 billion monthly active users as of March 31, 2014", with 76 percent checking in at least once per day.
Insofar as G+ has a reason to exist, it's an "anti-Facebook". But this doesn't represent much of a market outside the USA in general, and Silicon Valley in particular. For whatever reason, G+ has also attracted a somewhat toxic user base, with levels of abuse more typical of web comments than genuinely social sites. This also limits its appeal as a sort of long-form version of Twitter, though G+'s interface is too slow and clunky to provide serious competition.
As for competing with Facebook as a social network, that was never a likely prospect. Your friends and family are already on Facebook and they're not on G+, and even if you get the odd one to join, they probably won't use it. (Yes, I have tried.) Like it or not, Facebook has more global reach than Google Search or Gmail, Amazon, eBay or Wikipedia. It's not going away in a hurry.
G+ might have done better if it hadn't been delusional about replacing Facebook, and aimed at providing something that users -- rather than Google -- actually needed. What that might be is probably as much of a mystery to Vic Gundotra as it is to me.
* Footnote: If you are logged in to a Google account and visit Orkut, Google apparently creates an Orkut account for you, without asking. Further, "if you also have a Google+ account, Google will take the data from it (your name and avatar) to auto-populate your new Orkut account," according to Matt McGee, Editor-In-Chief of Marketing Land. What sort of company does that kind of thing?