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[MIKA27]

Well, The New Civilisation Game Starts Off Super-Depressing

This is the intro to the almost-out Civilisation: Beyond Earth. I hope you weren’t expecting a merry jaunt as humanity smiles its way to the stars along a rainbow made of puppies.

Beyond Earth takes place immediately after a space victory in Civilisation V, sort of like a direct sequel; where the old game ended with a ship heading for the stars, that’s where you begin this one.

You’re meant to play Civ games as a demi-God, looking down from above and worrying only about the biggest picture. Things like pollution and unhappiness are counters to manage, not actual things that affect real people. Even in the midst of nuclear war, Civ V’s pastures remain green, its seas a tranquil shade of blue.

So this heart-wrenching sequence, where a daughter leaves her father behind — forever — hits me right in the guts. It’s seeing a Civ game from the ground floor, and this Civ game has gone wrong. It’s dystopian. Children of Men-meets-Deep Impact.

In this game, humanity isn’t reaching for the stars. It’s running from the Earth.

Is this what it’s like for the people of my Civ when, wracked by economic hardship and threatened by more powerful neighbours, I sink my remaining energy into a desperate bid for a space victory?

If it is, no wonder we never see Civ games from a more personal viewpoint. It’s too depressing. We’d never get anything done.

[MIKA27]

Understanding Stalin

Russian archives reveal that he was no madman, but a very smart and implacably rational ideologue.

How did Stalin become Stalin?

Or, to put it more precisely: How did Iosif Vissarionovich Djugashvili—the grandson of serfs, the son of a washerwoman and a semiliterate cobbler—become Generalissimo Stalin, one of the most brutal mass murderers the world has ever known?

How did a boy born in an obscure Georgian hill town become a dictator who controlled half of Europe?

How did a devout young man who chose to study for the priesthood grow up to become a zealous atheist and Marxist ideologue?

Under Freud’s influence, many ambitious biographers—not to mention psychologists, philosophers, and historians—have sought answers in their subject’s childhood. Just as Hitler’s fanaticism has been “explained” by his upbringing, his sex life, or his alleged single ********, so has Stalin’s psychopathic cruelty been attributed to the father who, in Stalin’s own words, “thrashed him mercilessly,” or to the mother who may have had an affair with a local priest. Other accounts have featured the accident that left Stalin with a withered arm, the smallpox infection that badly scarred his face, or the birth defect that joined two of his toes and gave him a webbed left foot—the mark of the devil.

Politics have influenced Stalin’s biographers too. During his lifetime, sympathizers made him into a superhero, but opponents have imposed their prejudices as well. Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s worst enemy, was far and away his most influential 20th-century interpreter, shaping the views of a generation of historians, from Isaac Deutscher onward. Trotsky’s Stalin was lacking in wit and gaiety, an unlettered and provincial man who obtained power through bureaucratic manipulation and brute violence. Above all, Trotsky’s Stalin was a turncoat who betrayed first Lenin and then the Marxist cause. It was a portrait that served a purpose, inspiring Trotskyites to remain faithful to the Soviet revolution that “could have been”—if only Trotsky had come to power instead of the gray, guarded, cynical Stalin.

Since the opening of Soviet archives in the 1990s, these politicized and psychologized accounts of Stalin’s life have begun to unravel. Politics still influence how he is publicly remembered: in recent years, Russian leaders have played down Stalin’s crimes against his own people, while celebrating his military conquest of Europe. But the availability of thousands of once-secret documents and previously hidden caches of memoirs and letters has made it possible for serious historians to write the more interesting truth. Drawing on contacts in Tbilisi and Moscow for his Young Stalin, the historian and journalist Simon Sebag Montefiore, for example, offers a portrait of the dictator as a youthful rabble-rouser, Lothario, poet, and pamphleteer—hardly the lumpen bureaucrat of Trotsky’s imagination. Digging deep and long in obscure archival collections, the Russian academic Oleg Khlevniuk has produced marvelously detailed accounts of the incremental evolution of the Soviet Communist Party from the chaos of the revolution into what eventually became Stalinism. Khlevniuk’s books—alongside the edited letters of Stalin to two of his sidekicks, Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich, and dozens of published documents on the history of the Gulag, of collectivization, of the Ukrainian famine, of the KGB—show that Stalin did not create the Soviet dictatorship through mere trickery. Nor did he do it alone. He was helped by a close circle of equally dedicated men, as well as thousands of fanatical secret policemen.

In an exceptionally ambitious biography—the first volume of a projected three takes us from Stalin’s birth, in 1878, up to 1928 in just under 1,000 pages—Stephen Kotkin, a history professor at Princeton, sets out to synthesize the work of these and hundreds of other scholars. His goal in Stalin is to sweep the cobwebs and the mythology out of Soviet historiography forever. He dismisses the Freudians right away, arguing that nothing about Stalin’s early life was particularly unusual for a man of his age and background. Sergei Kirov, a member of Stalin’s inner circle, grew up in an orphanage after his alcoholic father abandoned the family and his mother died of tuberculosis. Grigory Ordzhonikidze, another crony, had lost both his parents by the time he was 10. The young Stalin, by contrast, had a mother who, despite her background, was ambitious and energetic, mobilizing her extended family on her talented son’s behalf.

More important, Kotkin notes, young Stalin stood out in late-19th-century Tiflis not because he was especially thuggish but because he was a remarkable student. By the age of 16, he had made his way into the Tiflis seminary, the “highest rung of the educational ladder in the Caucasus … a stepping-stone to a university elsewhere in the empire.” He eventually dropped out of school, drifting into the shadowy world of far-left politics, but remained a charismatic personality. In Baku, where he went in 1907 to agitate among the oil workers, he engaged in “hostage taking for ransom, protection rackets, piracy,” as well as the odd political assassination. He moved in and out of prison, showing a special facility for dramatic escapes and adopting a wide range of aliases and disguises.

Slowly, Kotkin builds the case for quite a different interpretation of Stalin—and for quite a few other things, too. The book’s signature achievement, and its main fault, is its vast scope: Kotkin has set out to write not only the definitive life of Stalin but also the definitive history of the collapse of the Russian empire and the creation of the new Soviet empire in its place. His canvas is crowded with details from the lives of Bismarck and Mussolini, as well as the czarist politicians Sergei Witte, Pyotor Stolypin, and Pyotor Durnovo; the czar and the czarina themselves; and of course Lenin, Trotsky, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Nikolai Bukharin, and Felix Dzerzhinsky, just for starters.

Year by year, crisis by crisis, a fine-grained picture of Stalin’s intellectual development nevertheless emerges. It is easy to forget, but on the eve of the Russian Revolution, Stalin was in his late 30s and had nothing to show for his life. He had “no money, no permanent residence, and no profession other than punditry,” meaning that he wrote articles for illegal newspapers. He certainly had no training in statecraft, and no experience managing anything at all. The Bolshevik coup d’état of 1917 brought him and his comrades their first, glorious taste of success. Their unlikely revolution—the result of Lenin’s high-risk gambles—validated their obscure and fanatical ideology. More to the point, it brought them personal security, fame, and power they had never before known.

As a result, most Bolshevik leaders continued to seek guidance in this ideology, and Stalin was no exception. In later years, outsiders would listen incredulously to the wooden pronouncements of the Soviet leadership and ask whether they could possibly be sincere. Kotkin’s answer is yes. Unlike the uneducated cynic of Trotsky’s imagination, the real Stalin justified each and every decision using ideological language, both in public and in private. It is a mistake not to take this language seriously, for it proves an excellent guide to his thinking. More often than not, he did exactly what he said he would do.

Certainly this was true in the realm of economics. The Bolsheviks, Kotkin rightly notes, were driven by “a combination of ideas or habits of thought, especially profound antipathy to markets and all things bourgeois, as well as no-holds-barred revolutionary methods.” Right after the revolution, these convictions led them to outlaw private trade, nationalize industry, confiscate property, seize grain and redistribute it in the cities—all policies that required mass violence to implement. In 1918, Lenin himself suggested that peasants should be forced to deliver their grain to the state, and that those who refused should be “shot on the spot.”

Although some of these policies, including forced grain requisitions, were temporarily abandoned in the 1920s, Stalin brought them back at the end of the decade, eventually enlarging upon them. And no wonder: they were the logical consequence of every book he had read and every political argument he had ever had. Stalin, as Kotkin reveals him, was neither a dull bureaucrat nor an outlaw but a man shaped by rigid adherence to a puritanical doctrine. His violence was not the product of his subconscious but of the Bolshevik engagement with Marxist-Leninist ideology.

This ideology offered Stalin a deep sense of certainty in the face of political and economic setbacks. If policies designed to produce prosperity created poverty instead, an explanation could always be found: the theory had been incorrectly interpreted, the forces were not correctly aligned, the officials had blundered. If Soviet policies were unpopular, even among workers, that too could be explained: antagonism was rising because the class struggle was intensifying.

Whatever went wrong, the counterrevolution, the forces of conservatism, the secret influence of the bourgeoisie could always be held responsible. These beliefs were further reinforced by the searing battles of 1918–20 between the Red and White Armies. Over and over again, Stalin learned that violence was the key to success. “Civil war,” Kotkin writes, “was not something that deformed the Bolsheviks; it formed them … [providing] the opportunity to develop and to validate the struggle against ‘exploiting classes’ and ‘enemies’ (domestic and international), thereby imparting a sense of seeming legitimacy, urgency, and moral fervor to predatory methods.”

For Stalin, the civil war was especially formative, since it gave him his first experience of executive power. In 1918, he was sent to the city of Tsaritsyn, strategically situated along the Volga River and the site of an important rail junction. His mission was to secure food for the starving workers of Moscow and Petrograd—to confiscate grain, in other words, and to serve, in effect, as the “Bolshevik bandit-in-chief.” To meet the challenge, he granted himself military powers, took over the local branch of the secret police, and stole 10 million rubles from another group of Bolsheviks. When the rail lines failed to function as he wished, he executed the local technical specialists, calling them “class aliens.” He disposed of other suspected counterrevolutionaries, Kotkin argues, “not from sadism or panic, but as a political strategy, to galvanize the masses,” warning his followers that internal foes of the revolution were about to stage a rebellion, recapture the city, and hand it over to the White Army: “Here, in tiniest embryo, was the scenario of countless fabricated trials of the 1920s and 30s.”

These methods almost led to the military collapse of Tsaritsyn, and Lenin was eventually persuaded to recall Stalin to Moscow. But they did produce the grain. And after the civil war ended, Stalin’s military failures were forgotten. Tsaritsyn was even renamed Stalingrad. This pattern would repeat itself throughout Stalin’s life. Time after time, when faced with a huge crisis, he would use extralegal, “revolutionary methods” to solve it. Sometimes the result was to prolong and deepen the crisis. But if he was sufficiently ruthless, all opposition ultimately melted away. Kotkin’s first volume ends with Stalin’s announcement of his decision to collectivize Soviet agriculture. Enacting that policy would require the displacement, the imprisonment, and eventually the orchestrated starvation of millions of people, and it resulted in Stalin’s complete political triumph.

In the contemporary West, we often assume that perpetrators of mass violence must be insane or irrational, but as Kotkin tells the story, Stalin was neither. And in its way, the idea of Stalin as a rational and extremely intelligent man, bolstered by an ideology sufficiently powerful to justify the deaths of many millions of people, is even more terrifying. It means we might want to take more seriously the pronouncements of the Russian politicians who have lately argued for the use of nuclear weapons against the Baltic states, or of the ISIS leaders who call for the deaths of all Christians and Jews. Just because their language sounds strange to us doesn’t mean that they, and those who follow them, don’t find it compelling, or that they won’t pursue their logic to its ultimate conclusion.

[MIKA27]

HAMMERED PEWTER TANKARD

When it comes to vessels for drinking beer, this hammered pewter tankard is just about as classy as you’re ever likely to get. Men and women have been imbibing the amber nectar from pewter tankards for over 400 years, over the past few decades they stopped using lead in the smelting process – resulting in tankards that won’t give you a side order of peripheral neuropathy and encephalopathy when you take a swig of ale.

Each of these tankards is handmade in England and measures 5″ high with a 1 pint capacity, the pewter used in non-tarnishing and it’s polished to a mirror finish.

Buy Here

[MIKA27]

The Lost Miracle Material That Could Have Changed the World

Human technology has always been propelled by new discoveries and inventions, and many of these have had their roots in one individual. It is those enterprising people who push at the frontiers of our understanding and follow their curiosity into the great unknown who truly propel our ever more technology dependent society. The inventions made by these people are the fuel that powers our progress. As inspiring as this might be, there are the sad cases of what could have been, the ones that for whatever reasons became lost to us and represent a staggering loss of technological potential. One such case is that of a miraculous material, called Starlite, that was created in the 1980s. It was a discovery that truly could have impacted our society in major ways, yet has been lost much to our detriment.

Starlite is the name given to a unique polymer with allegedly extreme insulation properties that is seemingly impervious to heat. During tests it was claimed to have been demonstrated to easily withstand temperatures of 10,000 degrees Celsius. In one 1993 episode of the BBC science and technology show Tomorrow’s World, an egg was coated with Starlite and then subjected to several minutes of intense blasting from a blowtorch. After around 5 minutes of this unforgiving heat assault, the egg showed no scorch marks, was not hot to the touch, and when cracked into a bowl proved to still be totally raw. The coating seemed to totally deflect heat, and could even keep a blowtorch from burning a human hand. Starlite was also placed in the path of a high powered energy flashes meant to simulate the scorching heat of a nuclear blast. The material not only survived the ordeal, but emerged virtually unscathed save for a tiny scorch mark on its surface. It was claimed that this creation had a Q-value, or energy absorption rating, of 2,470. To put that into perspective, the tiles used to shield space shuttles from reentry heat have a Q-value of 1. Add to this the fact that Starlite was claimed to be able to do the same job as space shuttle tiles at 1mm thick rather than the 75mm thick tiles used now and you’ve got a pretty remarkable thing.

Starlite had been hailed as a spectacular, game changing, and indeed seemingly impossible material that not only could challenge current assumptions of physics and thermodynamics, but due to its vast fire retardant and thermal barrier capabilities could also be used in a huge amount of practical applications that could save countless lives. The implications of a lightweight, easy to apply material with the properties Starlite is said to have are truly astounding. If it is even half of what it claims to be, it could change our lives forever.

Sounds pretty good so far, right? So why don’t we have this wonder-polymer available right now? Why aren’t airplanes, spacecraft, indeed even houses, clothes, furniture, military equipment, and pretty much anything else you want to completely insulate and do not want to burn up in a fire spray coated with this stuff? If Starlite is so amazing, then where is it? To answer these questions, it is necessary to go back to the beginning.

Starlite’s development, creation, and history are just about as impressive as the supposed physical qualities it possesses. Starlite and all of its purported amazing abilities came from the mind of one man, an eccentric amateur chemist from England by the name of Maurice Ward. Ward started out operating a modest family business as a ladies hairdresser with his family in Yorkshire, England. He had never gone to university and had absolutely no formal scientific training, but had always been a born tinkerer, and had taught himself about chemistry. His first steps into the world of inventing were trying to concoct new types of hair dye and other hair products for use in his shop. Ward would spend hours in his workshop mixing together different ingredients in a process of tireless trial and error, and his homemade creations became quite popular with customers.

Maurice Ward, inventor of Starlite

Ward may have continued his quest for the perfect hair dye and hair care products forever if it had not been for one fateful day on August 22 1985, when he happened to see the news of a Corfu-bound plane flight that had crashed at Manchester airport. The ill-fated plane had had an engine catch fire and proceeded to fall from the sky to smash upon the tarmac, killing 55 people, many of them from toxic fumes from the burning wreckage. At the time of this disaster, planes were not required to have fireproof panels of any type, a fact that was undoubtedly a factor in the crash. Ward saw this news and became convinced that the whole accident could have been averted if only they had used some sort of fireproof paneling on the plane. Ward became obsessed with the idea of creating a fireproof, lightweight plastic that would also have the added benefit of not producing deadly toxic fumes if burned.

He began his experiments in earnest, testing and combining various different materials. Ward’s process perhaps deviates from the usual image of creating a groundbreaking invention that could change the world. Rather than in labs and with strict scientific protocol, Ward was using commonly available ingredients that he mixed together in a blender in his own kitchen over many sessions of blind trial and error. He would sometimes go through 20 different formulations a day, with little idea of what he was doing and basically just throwing things at the wall to see what would stick. When he had perfected some of the formulas, Ward took the most promising ones and made them into sheets that could be tested with a blowtorch. When he performed his tests, he was shocked at the results. Not only did the material resist the blowtorch flame, but it remained cool to the touch even after intense scorching with 2,500 degree Celsius heat, and was able to prevent the blowtorch from burning a hand and even his own face placed behind the sheet. The inventor was astonished. Without any formal training or even a college degree he had created a prototype formula at his kitchen table for a material that acted as an unprecedented thermal barrier the likes of which no one had ever imagined or been able to make with even billions of dollars of research and development at their disposal.

An egg treated with Starlite not being cooked by a blowtorch

Excited about his discovery, which at the time he called “gubbins,” Ward was eager to show it to someone and find a way to market it. He was awash with the notion that his discovery would not only potentially change the world, but also make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. These hopes would be quickly dashed. Ward took the material to a friend who worked at a chemical company and it was subjected to some tests of its heat resistance. It is reported to have easily stood up to the tests, but that was as far as things went. The manager at the plant was not interested in such a thing at the time, and turned Ward down. The dejected inventor left with his head down, but continued with his work nevertheless, mixing up different concoctions and testing them with a blowtorch in a never ending quest to further perfect the formula. Eventually, his final version of the material was ready, and he called it Starlite, a name his 8 year old daughter thought up.

With his new and improved version in hand, Ward once again tried to raise interest in his creation, but again ran into difficulties. His lack of any scientific credentials coupled with his incredibly bold claims as to what Starlite could do prevented anyone from really taking Ward seriously, and he was turned down without anyone really bothering to verify the material’s capabilities. Ward was seen as a huckster out to swindle people with a bottle of snake oil. However, he stood by his product and, determined to show the world what they were missing, decided to appear on the TV show Tomorrow’s World to give a live demonstration of Starlite. After the impressive egg demonstration, people finally began to take notice.

The potential military applications of a non-burning, non-toxic lightweight plastic that could shield from extreme heat were not lost on defense contractors. In White Sands, New Mexico, a square of Starlite was subjected to a simulated nuclear blast that leveled trees and threw cars around, yet the material was unscathed. The Atomic Weapons Establishment in the UK also organized a test of Starlite where they subjected the material to simulated nuclear blasts rated as having 70 kilocaloric forces, or the power of 70 Hiroshima explosions. Twice Starlite was blasted in this manner and it was only slightly charred, a feat beyond even Ward’s own ambitious expectations. These blasts were reaching temperatures in excess of 10,000 degrees Celsius, enough to vaporize pure carbon, the element currently known as having the highest melting point known to man, many times over. It was a result that flew in the face of our current understanding of thermodynamics, yet it had happened under the watchful eye and strict controls of legitimate organizations.

More tests followed after that. At the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern, Starlite was pounded with concentrated, high intensity laser beams that would have normally cut through any polymer like butter. Starlite was barely scratched, showing only very tiny pits in the surface where the laser had hit it. The scientists present could not figure out how it was possible, and came to the conclusion that the material must have been absorbing, deflecting, and diffusing heat all at once through some as yet unknown, complicated process they could not fathom. Analysis of the thermal conductivity of the material by one scientist showed it to be a composite material with an engineered smart protection mechanism. NASA was very interested in this stuff, and its spokesman, Rudi Narangor, publicly exhalted the capabilities of Starlite, saying:

‘We have done a lot of evaluation and … we know all the tremendous possibilities that this material has.’

With such praise and high profile successes under his belt, the sky seemed to be the limit for Ward. Defense contractors and corporations began to come out of the woodwork, contacting him constantly with offers. One would think that Ward would have jumped at these opportunities, but conversely, the more coverage his product got, the more he withdrew and hesitated to let the formula go. He became extremely paranoid about the material getting into the wrong hands or being used in ways he had not intended. Ward refused to send out samples to companies because he feared it would be reverse engineered by less than scrupulous organizations, and only let a sample out of his sight once, with the piece sent to New Mexico for testing. Ward also would not patent Starlite because he feared it would lead to somebody stealing his recipe for it. The increasingly reticent inventor would not even let the impressive results of Starlite tests be published in peer reviewed scientific journals due to fears that someone would discover its secret somehow.

A block of Starlite with a scorch mark the only visible damage from a nuclear blast

The business end of matters was no better. When meeting with potential buyers, Ward displayed eccentric practices such as declining to sign confidentiality agreements and insisting on keeping a 51% share of the formula. The prices he demanded often fluctuated wildly as well, and he would ask for 1 million pounds one day only to turn around and ask for 10 million the next, with the price climbing in sudden large increments. Sometimes he would demand large sums of money just for the privilege of having talks int the first place. He was reportedly notoriously stubborn and difficult to deal with in negotiations with large companies, with whom he could not seem to reach any meaningful agreements. Ward’s paranoid demands and refusals sabotaged all such negotiations and ultimately caused talks to break down with several big companies, military organizations, NASA, and high profile corporations like Boeing, all of which had shown intense interest in the polymer.

As a result of Ward’s paranoia, greed, and inability to hand over his invention or come to any agreement with the companies that sought to buy Starlite, the revolutionary polymer remained in limbo for years. In his later years, Ward began to soften his stance and was talking about finally patenting his creation. He was also in new negotiations with a couple of big companies, including an airline manufacturer, to market it. However, in May, 2011, Ward passed away without ever selling his formula or divulging how it was processed. The composition of Starlite is a complete and utter mystery. It is believed to be a composite of 21 ingredients, including polymers and co-polymers with both organic and inorganic additives, borate, and small amounts of ceramics, with the material oddly composed of around 90 percent organic material, but other than that no one knows.

Before Ward’s death, the inventor had stated that his family knew the heavily guarded secret formula and production process for Starlite, yet after he passed away they never once came forward with anything to demonstrate that they did. To this day, not a single person has come forward to show how to fabricate the material, and thus it appears that it is very possible that Ward took the secret of his astounding creation to his grave.

The huge benefits such a material could have provided are obvious. Starlite was a true modern miracle and a marvel of DIY chemistry the likes of nothing the world had ever seen. It is unfortunate that it may have finally been defeated with the death of its inventor, something not even the power of 70 Hiroshima-sized bombs could do.

[MIKA27]

Bulgarian Vampire Buried With Iron Stake Through Heart

If you’re worried that a wooden stake won’t keep a vampire from rising from the grave, go for an iron one. That’s apparently what some medieval vampire believers did to a corpse whose skeleton was recently discovered in southern Bulgaria.

The finding was made by a team digging under the direction of archeologist Nikolai Ovcharov among the ruins of Perperikon, an ancient city dating back to 5,000 BC and once inhabited by the Thracians, Indo-European tribes mentioned in the Iliad as allies of the Greeks in the Trojan War. Perperikon is also believed to be the site of the Temple of Dionysius, the Greek God of wine and fertility.

The well-preserved skeleton appears to be from around the 13th century and is a of a male between the ages of 40 and 50. The “stake” was actually a heavy iron ploughshare and the man’s left leg was also cut off below the knee and placed next to the body. This vampire wasn’t going anywhere, says Ovcharov.

The ploughshare weighs almost two pounds and is dug into the body into a broken shoulder bone. You can clearly see how the collarbone has literally popped out.

Nikolai Ovcharov at the site of another unusual burial in Bulgaria.

The team also discovered the remains of woman and a young child that were buried in a manner similar to paintings of the Virgin Mary and child, another medieval custom used not to because of vampires but to protect the population from the plague, a real killer in the Middle Ages.

Why was this man considered to be a vampire and buried in this manner? Ovcharov offers one possibility.

We have no doubts that once again we’re seeing an anti-vampire ritual being carried out. Often they were applied to people who had died in unusual circumstances—such as suicide,

Bulgaria may replace Romania as vampire-central as over 100 similar burials have been discovered there in recent excavations and some date to before Vlad the Impaler.

[MIKA27]

Nurse Nasty Suspected of Killing 38 People in Italy

She gave the aged patients laxatives so other nurses would have to clean up. And if the patients whined or annoyed her, she allegedly killed them to shut them up.

ROME, Italy — There’s nasty. And then there’s diabolic. Daniela Poggiali, an Italian nurse who was just arrested for the suspected death of at least one patient and as many as 38 more in the north of Italy, would appear to be both.

When Poggiali, 42, was feeling nasty, according to her colleagues, she would ply her elderly patients with laxatives at the end of her shift and leave the “dirty work” for the nurses taking over for her at the Umberto I Hospital of Lugo near Ravenna. When she was feeling diabolic, according to state prosecutor Alessandro Mancini, she would ply the patients’ veins with potassium to kill them.

In one case last April, the narcissistic nurse then took smiling selfies with the open-mouthed cadaver of 78-year-old Rosa Calderoni. In one cellphone photo, a cropped version of which was published in the Italian press, she is seen imitating the dead woman by opening her own mouth in a sly smile. She had superimposed a caption mocking her alleged victim: “Brr,’ mmh, la vita e la morte, mmh” (life and death).

“If someone is capable of taking a photo like that, they are capable of doing a lot more,” Mancini told reporters outside her arraignment hearing.

Poggiali was often the only nurse on the night shift at the regional hospital that served mostly elderly patients in the absence of a nursing home. Most of the 38 alleged victims were gravely ill or suffered terminal conditions. According to Poggiali’s colleagues, she often complained about the whiney patients and pushy relatives and often appeared to be acting suspiciously. According to a police investigation leaked to Corriere della Sera newspaper, a nurse at the hospital told investigators that when patients were particularly cranky, she often said, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.”

When Calderoni’s family filed a complaint and request for an autopsy, authorities found extraordinary high levels of potassium in the elderly woman’s blood. It takes around 48 hours for a patient poisoned with potassium to die, which gave Poggiali plenty of distance from the deaths. Two other people died on the same day as Calderoni. The week before Calderoni died, a relative of the hospital director, who Poggiali reportedly did not get along with, also died.

In fact, during the first four months of 2014, 39 people, including Calderoni, died and the hospital staff started to get suspicious. According to the court documents, the hospital administrator told the supervisors after Calderoni’s death that if anyone else dies, not to call the morgue, call the cops. Police then spent the next five months investigating Poggiali, careful not to leave her alone in the hospital ward. No one else died.

At least two of Poggiali’s colleagues have given evidence against the nurse. According to court documents published in the Italian press, Marinella Felloni told investigators that she saw Poggiali stuff around €300 worth of medicine into her backpack at the end of her shift one day last spring. When she asked Poggiali about the drugs she appeared to be stealing, Poggiali is supposed to have answered, “I pay my taxes.” Felloni then told her superiors about the backpack, but when they checked inside, they found only a bouquet of cyclamen flowers tied with a black ribbon.

Another nurse, Sara Pausini, told investigators that Poggiali often argued with colleagues and treated patients not assigned to her. “She was tireless and often seemed in a state of euphoria,” Pausini told police, according to the documents.

Questions are being raised why no one caught Poggiali when people started dying last spring. But because most of the patients were elderly and unwell, autopsies were never carried out and the patients were interred without suspicion until Calderoni’s family demanded answers. Poggiali, who was laid off before she was arrested, has so far refused to answer questions put forth by police, according to the preliminary judge who signed her arrest warrant, Rossella Materia, who described her actions as psychotic. “The defendant derives pleasure from the humiliating death of those who perish in such a weak state,” Materia wrote in her court document. “It becomes a form of self affirmation.”

Poggiali’s defense lawyer, Stefano Dalla Valle, has refused to comment on his client’s case. Poggiali will face a preliminary hearing later this year.

[MIKA27]

JEEP OFF-ROAD CAMPER TRAILERS

The wrangler was built to conquer any and all terrain, but what about your trailer? Sure you can see the perfect camping spot just over the horizon, but that big clunky trailer just isn’t going to make the journey. Jeep’s Off-Road Camper Trailers ensure your mobile basecamp can go anywhere your Wrangler can.

Teaming up with the folks at Mopar, these Jeep campers come in two different models including the Trail Edition and the Extreme Trail Edition. The former was built for less demanding destinations, and sports a lightweight, all aluminum construction with 12 inches of ground clearance and 32-inch tires. The latter was designed for those harder to reach destinations, and sports a heavier frame with 15 inches of ground clearance, a full underbody skid plate and meaty 35-inch tires. Both models are equipped with 17-inch alloy wheels, sleeping accommodations for four adults, queen size bed, sofa, built-in cabinet, stowable table, privacy shades, and window screens. The 110-volt power supply keeps all your gadgets charged on the go, andJeep’s premium canvas enclosure helps you stay safe from the elements. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

LAUCALA ISLAND RESORT IN FIJI

When you’re looking for the greatest vacation destinations on Earth, there are few geographic regions that compare to Fiji. And while there are countless resorts to choose from on the island country in the South Pacific, the Laucala Island Resort is one of our personal favorites.

This private resort spans spans over 3,500 acres, and features beautiful lagoons, stunning beaches, and let’s not forget those gorgeous coconuts plantations and green vegetation covering the entire mountainside. The resort consists of 25 villas, all of which are decked out with everything you need to enjoy your stay in paradise including outdoor showers, wrap around patios, and private infinity pools. Not to mention the fact that the entire suite opens up to those breathtaking panoramic ocean views. Maybe you don’t feel like sitting around, doing nothing all day (although we’re not sure why), there’s still plenty of activities to participate in. The resort offers everything from diving and rain forest tours to a more adrenaline packed quad bike adventure. Which is exactly what we’d expect for a small island owned by the co-founder of Red Bull energy drinks. Make sure to bring your GoPro. [Purchase]

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THE GLENLIVIT NADURRA DRAM WHISKEY CHAIR

The fine folks at The Glenlivit distillery have set out on a mission to create the perfect chair for enjoying a dram of whiskey. It looks like the iconic brand has succeeded with the Nadurra Dram Chair.

Teaming up with British furniture designer Gareth Neal (of The New Craftsmen), The Glenlivit wanted to create something that celebrated their heritage of the brand from top to bottom. The chair gains its name from the whiskey maker’s first batch of Nadurra (which is Gaelic for “natural”) whiskey dating all the way back to 1824. The craftsmanship on the chair is second to none, and Neal only used the finest materials available – all of which pay homage to the whiskey distillery.

The entire chair is hand crafted, with the body being constructed from Aberdeen Angus leather paired with legs and arms made from oak bark, the same oak bark that The Glenlivit uses in their casks to age the whiskey.

And the details don’t stop there. The rivets of the chair are crafted from the same copper used in the massive stills at the distillery, and a glass and bottle holder located on each of the arms provides the perfect finishing touch.

This batch of chairs is limited, and each one produced will be etched and individually numbered. This original chair will be on display at The New Craftsmen store in London for the time being (starting October 14th), which should help you decide if the roughly $9,900 price tag is worth it for you.

Sit back, relax and enjoy the short video above to delve more into the design and creation process of the Nadurra Gram Chair.

[MIKA27]

THE UKEG KEEPS BEER FRESH

Popping the top on your growler is like lighting the fuse to a bomb: in a couple days, you’ll be left with a flat brew you’ll have to drain pour while tears roll down your face. Your stylish solution is the uKeg. Thanks to the CO2 regulator cap, pressure gauge, and tap handle, your precious beer will stay fresh for up to a month. And besides keeping that microbrew fresher for much longer, the uKeg looks damn good with brass accents and whatever tap handle you feel like tossing on it. The double-wall vacuum insulated growler even sports a site gauge that allows you see exactly how much beer you have left to drink. Now cracking that growler doesn’t require you to get guzzling. [Purchase]

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GREY GOOSE VX VODKA

Already known as one of the top vodka makers in the world, Grey Goose continues to pioneer rather than follow fickle trends. Grey Goose VX is a great example, crafted with a hint of cognac, which gives it a truly distinctive aroma and flavor profile without interfering with the vodka experience. And make no mistake, this isn't a fly by night flavored spirit, but rather a high quality vodka housed in a beautiful bottle, that stands apart thanks to the small cognac influence, while remaining delicately balanced and unique.

[MIKA27]

14 Things to Look Forward to in Your 40s

Hitting 40 and freaking out a little? Crossing the halfway point in the race of life and can’t figure out where all the time went? Relax.

There’s a modicum of respect that comes with middle age and gray hair, but more importantly there’s a new freedom that comes with it. People assume you’ve gleaned some wisdom from your many years on God’s green Earth.

Whether they’re right or wrong, the door is wide open for you to say and do anything you want. Like, say, write a book called Curmudgeonism: A Surly Man’s Guide to Midlife. But really, that’s just one of many benefits, including the following…

14. Letting people fail because they need to

By the time you turn 40 you’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. You know that the next big thing really isn’t. A Dyson loses suction, Ginsu knives get dull, and there is no wonder drug in the entire world that keeps a boner up for more than a few minutes. But instead of telling your kids these things we let them learn it for themselves. Some people need to stick their fingers in the fire and smell the burning flesh to realize they should never do it again. Let them. Someone did it for you so pay it forward.

13. Embracing the inner curmudgeon

Middle-aged men have learned to walk away from idiots because we don’t have enough time left on Earth to tolerate stupid. We’re unapologetic and don’t give a s**t what people think, which is more liberating than you can imagine. In your forties, you finally say what’s truly on your mind without caring about the consequences. “What are they going to do to me?” becomes your mantra. Judge me, son. I’m doing the same to you right now. It’s a priceless privilege of age.

12. Self-sufficient kids and the liberation that comes with it

By middle age our kids are walking, talking, pooping, eating and dressing themselves all on their own. Your life no longer revolves around their feeding and sleeping schedule and you can finally take the wife out to dinner at that new place while leaving them home alone knowing full well they will have a party so you can come home early and bust them. That’s part of growing up and it’s your responsibility to make them realize they still can’t outsmart you. Take it seriously. Even better is when they start doing the chores so you can watch football.

11. A taste for the good stuff

For all life has to offer you will develop standards and won’t settle for less. SpaghettiOs and a sleeping bag might have been just fine in your dorm room days, but Charlie Manson will get out on good behavior before you do that **** again. Crappy booze? Forget it. Run to your car because it’s raining? That’s for weaklings afraid of a little water.

10. Reminding twentysomethings that they’ll be you someday

Rubbing your bald head or your bulbous belly while telling a smooth, chiseled, long-haired Michael Phelps that he will eventually turn into you is scintillating. Practice this line: “Your hair care products cost more than my Lipitor but less than a hobo’s dignity. Someday you will be me.”

9. A true sense of professionalism

We don’t realize what it really means to be a professional until we are one. Professionalism means taking the emotion out of the situation and using only facts to put some dumbass in his place. When others let anger, fear, sadness, frustration or whatever take over their lives, the professional man stays calm and lets experience be his guide. As we get older, restraint and tolerance shrink but we don’t let our emotions get the best of us because that would be unprofessional—even though we don’t give a **** who we offend.

8. MILFS and Cougars

Do I really need to explain this? Rawr.

7. A substantial portfolio and the unyielding pressure to protect it

Will the markets rise? Will they fall? When can I stop working for real and not come back? By your forties you’ve been in the workforce for a couple of decades and don’t want to put up with it anymore, so you hoard your money and scrutinize every expenditure so you can one day take the off ramp from the highway of pain and never look back on it. You debate whether or not you need those NFL tickets, a first-class plane ride or the cool new drone to spy on your daughter on her first dates because each and every purchase has an impact on the exact date you can tell your boss to piss off and really mean it.

6. A greater sense of irritation at the government

Now that you actually have something worth protecting, you pay more attention to what the government is doing and how it will or will not affect you. In your twenties and thirties you could get away with voting blindly or not at all, but then Senator Grinch enacts a tax that hits your hard-earned portfolio in the scrotum and suddenly it’s time to dust off the soup bones and go to war.

5. Terrorizing boys who want to date your daughter

Don’t underestimate how fun this is. It’s your right as a father to make every boy earn the privilege of looking at your baby girl. Harrassing them is totally worth that drone purchase and in the end, she’ll thank you for it.

4. Reaching the intersection of “I need to get back in shape” and “I don’t have the energy to”

It’s a fact…we all slow down after 40 and cannot, no matter how badly you think so, do the things you did 10 years prior. You tell yourself you need to get into the gym more to fight the flab, but then you can’t find the energy to, so you face a decision…let it go or step up your game? Be a fatbody or a FILF? The path you choose says a lot about who you are and is a key decision in middle age that will stay with you.

3. Golf

Because your days of playing hard sports are over. After 40 you’re like the infamous leg lamp from A Christmas Story… fragile and easily breakable. You will yawn or stretch and suddenly throw out a shoulder or walk down a flight of stairs and pull your pancreas. Basketball passes you by and rugby is out of the question. You will resign yourself to golf and hate it until you realize just how sweet the (rare) perfect tee shot or putt feels.

2. A deeper appreciation for true friends and absolutely no desire whatsoever to make new ones

In midlife you don’t need friends. You have Amazon. You’ve met enough great people that you become reluctant to meet anyone new because you know they won’t measure up to the compadres of your past and present. Your friends are your brothers and the chances of inducting a new brother into the current clan are remote.

1. Nooners

By now you’ve established yourself at your job and no one questions when you want to head home for lunch. And by lunch I mean your significant other bent over the kitchen island while the kids are at school. Take advantage of this opportunity before the fifties kick in and you don’t have the energy.

[MIKA27]

Witch Doctor Kills Women Accused of Witchcraft in Tanzania

Halloween season means plenty of cartoonish witch displays and sexy witch costumes for parties, but the reality of what’s happening in Tanzania to women believed to be witches is truly horrifying. This week in the village of Murufiti, seven women accused of witchcraft were burned alive by a mob of villagers lead by a witch doctor.

The killings were reported in Tanzania’s Mwananchi newspaper after local police arrested 23 people, including the witch doctor, a traditional village healer, and other leaders and charged them with murder. According to the report, five of the women were over 60 and the other two over 40.

Skulls and talismans used by Tanzanian witch doctors.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident in Tanzania. It’s estimated that 500 people accused of being witches are killed by similar mobs every year, according to The Legal and Human Rights Centre. Many of those killed are elderly women who have red eyes – a sign that a person might be a witch but more likely caused by the smoke from using dung as a fuel for cooking and heating. Also targeted are albinos whose bodies are often cut up and kept as good luck charms.

Groups like The Legal and Human Rights Centre are trying to end this horrible practice by educating the public and by putting pressure on local politicians and police to be proactive in stopping the mob leaders and witch doctors rather than just arresting the killers after the fact. A poll of 18 sub-Saharan countries found that over half of the population believe in magic – not just for healing or curses but also for help in finding jobs or spouses. Women accused of witchcraft are often blamed and punished for accidents or unexplainable events.

It’s hard to believe these practices still exist and even thrive today. Education is a powerful too in eradicating these terrible attacks on women and those who are different than us. It’s also important to remember that many of our seemingly harmless traditions are rooted in beliefs that are much more harmful.

[MIKA27]

A Spider Apparently Crawled Inside This Australian Man's Body For Three Days

An Australian man’s holiday to Bali took a dark turn last week after he discovered a painful red line forming above his belly button. At first, doctors told 21-year-old Dylan Thomas that it was just an insect bite. Then the line started to grow. It was apparently a spider burrowed into his belly.

It slowly climbed up towards his heart. The arachnid, which was about the size of a match head, survived inside of the man’s body for three days before doctors finally pulled it out. Thomas described the pain as a “searing burn”. His friends now call him Spiderman.

“It takes a lot to deter me, but I do feel violated,” Thomas told NT News. “It was a very bizarre experience just to know something like that was in my body for a couple of days.” Again, bizarre seems like an understatement.

[MIKA27]

Aussies To Miss Out On Apple SIM With New iPads

So here’s a cool idea. On the new Cellular iPads, Apple is introducing something called the Apple SIM. Basically, it’s a SIM card that lives in the device as soon as you get it and lets you choose from a variety of different data providers. No contract plans that let you bounce around between data carriers giving true power to the people. It’s a great idea that won’t come to Australia.

Here’s how Apple describes Apple SIM:

“The new Apple SIM is preinstalled on iPad Air 2 with Wi-Fi + Cellular models. The Apple SIM gives you the flexibility to choose from a variety of short-term plans from select carriers in the U.S. and UK right on your iPad. So whenever you need it, you can choose the plan that works best for you — with no long-term commitments. And when you travel, you may also be able to choose a data plan from a local carrier for the duration of your trip.”

Apple has told us this morning that the feature is just for the US and UK markets.

Sad face.

[MIKA27]

Xbox One Update Lets You Buzz Your Controller When It's Lost

Microsoft has begun rolling out a new update for the Xbox One, plonking several new handy features on the hulking great box in your living room. The new content is aimed at allowing owners easier use of the Snap multitasking function, access to their social circles and making their Xbox account more secure.

If you’re one of those players that use the Snap function a lot, the new update provides you with better navigation. You can double tap the Guide button to open a new app in Snap mode, close any app you’re using or switch between an app and the game you’re playing. You can also record 30 seconds of gameplay while you’re in this mode.

Players will now also be able to gain easier access to their friends and Achievements simply by double tapping the console’s Guide button. They will also see which of their friends have unlocked the same Achievements they have. There’s a new Gamer Score Leaderboard tucked in there, which notifies players of how high up or low down they are on the geek foodchain.

Players can also access the game console’s clock, game Digital Video Recorder functionality and check the battery life on their control pad. The patch can even help players find their controller if it’s gone astray under the couch, by making it vibrate remotely.

The new update adds an improved two-step-security authentication — in the same vein as a Gmail account.

Certain regions are getting an improved Live TV setup, which give players the option to watch TV through their Xbox One’s connection to their set-top box on booting up.

The patch is a reasonable 249MB, and it starts rolling out today.

[MIKA27]

The iPad Mini 3 Is Just The iPad Mini 2 With Touch ID

Last year’s update turned the iPad Mini into the tablet we deserved. And this time around Apple has given us, uh, pretty much the exact same thing as last year. But hey — Touch ID! And goldpagne. Don’t forget goldpagne.

Design

It’s official — goldpagne has finally come to iPad land. But besides taking its colour cues directly from the new iPhone 6 (and pretty much looking like an ever so slightly larger iPhone 6 Plus), the new iPad Mini 3 really doesn’t look all that different. Because it is not.

Guts

There really, really isn’t a whole lot new here. You have the exact same camera. The exact same screen. And the exact same processor. In other words, for all intents and purposes, this is the exact same tablet in a vaguely different skin. So what gives?

Apple doesn’t want you to buy an iPad Mini. It wants you to buy an iPhone 6 Plus. After all, a phone is something you update every few years, but a tablet is a one time purchase that presumably lasts a lifetime-ish. Which is why we saw Tim Cook perfectly happy to brush the Mini under the rug.

Don’t take our word for it. Here’s the iPad Mini 3 on the left and the iPad Mini 2 on the right:

Yep.

The real (and only) new trick here, though, is Touch ID. Formerly relegated to your phone, you can now use Apple’s biometric fingerprint scanner in place of a passcode. Which is especially convenient for the iPad Mini in particular; you can have one hand full and still be able to both read and unlock your tablet using the other.

Pricing and Availability

The iPad Mini 3 is priced at $499 in Australia for the 16GB model, $619 for the 64GB model, and $739 for the 128GB model. LTE versions are priced at $659, $779 and $899, respectively.

So — not all that much to be excited about here in terms of the new. But on the bright side, the iPad Mini 2 is a lot more affordable — and it’s pretty much the same damn tablet anyway.

[MIKA27]

Amazingly Thrilling Video Of F-18 Fighters With Ambient Sound

This spectacular footage of F/A-18 Hornets and Super Hornets is how all aviation videos should be: Just amazingly crispy shots with no stupid musical soundtrack. It makes you feel like you are sitting right there in the cockpit with the pilots. An incredibly detailed look into the F-18s of the USS Enterprise.

MIKA: This is a wet dream come true, this video is amazing!

[MIKA27]

Marine Survives Taliban Sniper Headshot Thanks To Helmet

Afghanistan veteran Sam Arnold uploaded this spine-chilling video of a US Marine getting a direct headshot from a Taliban sniper — only to be saved by his kevlar helmet. It’s incredible to watch, especially the face of relief and disbelief of the impact victim. That was a really close call.

According to Arnold, “the Marines were conducting a joint helicopter raid in the Now Zad district, Helmand Province in 2013. The shot occurs right at the :19 mark in the video.”

[MIKA27]

Wernher Von Braun Predicted We'd Send Men To Mars No Sooner Than 2050s

Student researchers at MIT have concluded that given current technology, any colonists to Mars would die after about 68 days. Mars One, the company that hopes to put people on Mars by the 2025 (and film a reality TV show there, so you know they’re legit) insists that the MIT researchers are wrong. But as any student of paleo-futurism would know, even the most optimistic space prognosticators of the past century would side with the MIT students.

To take just one example, let’s look at the April 30 (1954) issue of Collier’s magazine, which featured a splashy feature article dedicated to the future of exploring Mars. It was quite optimistic, and no doubt inspired countless kids to think that they might live in space stations by the time they were adults. But when it came to Mars, space pioneer (and former Nazi scientist) Wernher von Braun didn’t mince words. It would be “a century or more” before humans set foot on the red planet.

From Collier’s:

Will man ever go to Mars? I am sure he will — but it will be a century or more before he’s ready. In that time scientists and engineers will learn more about the physical and mental rigors of interplanetary flight — and about the unknown dangers of life on another planet. Some of that information may become available within the next 25 years or so, through the erection of a space station above the earth (where telescope viewings will not be blurred by the earth’s atmosphere) and through the subsequent exploration of the moon, as described in previous issues of Collier’s.

Any time people insist that we’ll go to Mars in the near future, I always think about Wernher von Braun’s 1954 predictions for manned trips to Mars. We often think of people in the 1950s and ’60s as taking for granted the most outlandishly optimistic predictions for the future. But as we’re continually reminded, people of the past weren’t stupid. Or, at least, they were no more stupid than the people of today.

[MIKA27]

Saving This Sinking City Will Cost $US40 Billion

Venice? Sure, it’s sinking. So is Mexico City, Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City. But none of them are being submerged as fast as Jakarta, which is sinking as much as several centimetres a year — for comparison’s sake, Venice is sinking by 2cm every year. Now, Jakarta is undertaking a three-decade-long plan to save its coastline.

It’s not just rising tides that are to blame for Jakarta’s plunge. It’s the fact that the city has pumped its water out of deep underground wells for years — leaving empty chasms that are now sinking, according to a CityLab story from 2012. The stakes in the race against the rising tides are high: Millions of people are at risk right now, and the horrible floods of 2007 left 500,000 people homeless and caused hundreds of thousands to suffer food-related and water-related illnesses.

The ambitious plan to save it, unveiled last week, is extreme. It calls for 30 years of work, at a price of $US40 billion (at least), and would create 17 new islands as well as a 8km long wall, creating a reservoir to catch floodwaters between this new archipelago and the existing city. The government calls it “The Great Garuda“, a reference to the sweeping wing shape of the ring of artificial islands, which are akin to the mythical avian Garuda — which also happens to be the country’s national symbol, as well as the name of its national airline.

Behind this enormous infrastructural effort is an agreement between Indonesia and perhaps the most flood-endangered nation: The Netherlands. Holland, which has its own expansive plans to mitigate rising sea levels, is cooperating with the Indonesian government to design and carry out the 30-year masterplan as part of a joint nation-to-nation project. The shape of the islands, for example, is being planned by the Dutch firm KuiperCompagnons, which consults to cities around the world also dealing with flood mitigation. The masterplan is being developed by Dutch company Witteveen+Bos.

If it sounds odd that a group of Dutch companies are spearheading an effort to rebuilt the coastline of an Indonesian city, it won’t for long. The Netherlands have pioneered flood planning for centuries, but only over the past decade have they begun exporting their expertise — thanks to the rising tides that are suddenly threatening dozens of cities outside of their tiny low-lying country.

The plan to save Jakarta actually borrows from the nine-year project to save Holland’s own coastline, called Room for the River. The $US3 billion project will wrap up next year, and it’s based on a very simple but very paradoxical idea. To survive a flood, you have to allow water into areas where you might not want it. In other words. you have to provide places for all that water to go — both during the flood and as the water recedes — rather than relying on a single, massive wall or similar idea.

In the Netherlands, that meant creating dozens of unique infrastructural systems that can handle being inundated, from marshlands to berms to channels.

In Jakarta, it will mean several things. First, creating a wall roughly four miles from the coastline to slow storm surges. Second, the creation of a massive dam surrounding the city’s coastline made up of 17 artificial islands, described as “one of the world’s largest hydraulic engineering projects”, that will enclose the city and create a protective reservoir. The plan will take decades — as Witteveen+Bos point out, “supplying enough soil would require more dredging vessels than are currently available in the entire world” — which Indonesia doesn’t really have, but few other options exist.

It’s early days, but this is a project to keep a close eye on. In the end, it could become a model (or warning) for how low-lying cities should invest in infrastructure to save themselves as the waters rise.

[MIKA27]

A Gorgeous Tour of the Largest Ship in the World

At 194 feet wide and 1,312 feet long, the Matz Maersk Triple E is the largest ship ever built. It can carry 18,000 20-foot containers; its propellers weigh 70 tons apiece; it is too big for the Panama Canal, though it can shimmy through the Suez. All this is to say: This is a ship of daunting proportions.

Alastair Philip Wiper captured the grandeur of the Triple E with a single camera, tripod and shutter cable for the September issue of WIRED UK. The Copenhagen-based photographer travels light, even when shooting some of the world’s most intimidating industrial spaces. In recent years, he’s photographed the complicated interiors of CERN, the spiky anechoic chamber at Denmark’s Technical University and the shimmering Mont-Louise Solar Furnace nestled in the French Pyrenees. For this shoot, Wiper traveled to the Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering factory in the South Korean port of Opko.

Wiper not only captured the ship, but the shipyard where it was built, too.

On his blog, Wiper explains that Daewoo is one of the “big three” shipyards in South Korea, right behind Hyundai and Samsung’s yards. Right now, the shipyard is in the process of making eight more Triple Es, all in various stages of completion.

“The shipyard, about an hour from Busan in the south of the country, employs about 46,000 people, and could reasonably be described as the worlds biggest Legoland. Smiling workers cycle around the huge shipyard as massive, abstractly over proportioned chunks of ships are craned around and set into place: the Triple E is just one small part of the output of the shipyard, as around 100 other vessels including oil rigs are in various stages of completion at the any time.”

A technician working the steel blaster, which polishes metal before it’s painted.

Wiper had unprecedented access to the ship and shipyard, where he spent three days documenting the construction of the massive vessels. “I was expecting a tour of the ship from someone who knew it inside and out—instead I was just told, ‘Here it is—off you go!’” he writes. Upon asking if there was a map of the ship, he recalls being told, “No. The engine is that way, the bridge is that way. Have fun, and make sure you aren’t on board in 5 hours because the ship will be leaving for Russia.”

So Wiper set out on a self-guided tour, making photos of whatever caught his eye. In the photos you see a glimmering engine room that looks like something aboard a ship on its way to Oz and an absolutely cavernous cargo hold. He also documented the workday of shipworkers and the pleasing geometric shape of the hull.

By now Wiper knows what he’s looking for (strong lines) and how he’ll go about shooting it (usually straight-on). He’s gotten good at pinpointing the main systems of a space, which are the key to capturing the symmetry (and thus attractiveness) of large-scale industrial machines. Like much of Wiper’s work, the photo essay acknowledges the often overlooked beauty of industrial spaces. Through Wiper’s lens, tubes, bolts and hunks of metal transform into arresting graphical portraits. Presented with this massive feat of engineering, it’s possible that we’d miss the perspective that Wiper’s camera grants us; we might marvel at the sheer mass of the ship and miss the bits and pieces that and that, he says, is the whole point of his photography. “I’m trying to find these things that aren’t meant to be beautiful but are.”

The gleaming engine room.

The ship can carry 18,000 shipping containers. Here you see the cargo hold.

Wiper says he looks for strong lines and symmetry when shooting industrial spaces.

The ship is made from 425 pre-fabricated segments which connect to form 21 mega-block segments. Each ship took 955,250 litres of paint.

The ship's height is 73 meters.

This is Lars Peter Jensen, the captain of the Matz Maersk.

Each propeller weighs more than 150,000 pounds.

Wiper was given full access to the ship.

[MIKA27]

Sloviansk: A City With PTSD

A woman cries in front of her bullet-riddled home in a village outside Sloviansk.

There may be a 'ceasefire' in eastern Ukraine, but that's cold comfort for the war's survivors.

SLOVIANSK, Ukraine—Psychologist Tatyana Aslanyan is on a mission to treat a city that seems to be suffering from a collective form of post-traumatic stress disorder. “Everyone, in some way or another, shows the symptoms,” she told me at the Donbass State Pedagogical University in Sloviansk, the eastern Ukrainian city where she is an associate professor. The concrete university is perched on a hill, and we looked out on a landscape marked by stout industrial chimneys, many of which no longer emit smoke.

In August, a month after Ukrainian forces wrestled Sloviansk back from rebel control, Aslanyan opened a crisis center in the city’s library. There, psychologists respond to a stream of residents battling insomnia, depression, domestic violence, and anger by using art therapy, toys, and counseling. “Kiev can’t help us, so we’ve taken the city’s misery into our own hands,” she told me, in reference to the Ukrainian capital. An engaging and lively woman, Aslanyan was dressed in an angular jacket with a shock of orange lipstick, making her appear more like a high-flying lawyer than a psychologist who must scale seven floors to reach her office each morning (the university’s four elevators haven’t worked in months). “In a way, we’d be better off if we knew something bad [was going to] befall us, because then we [could] at least prepare,” Aslanyan said. “But this uncertainty only exacerbates the city’s PTSD.”

Only 50 miles north of what locals call “the line,” where rebel territory begins, and with much of Sloviansk bullet-sprayed and in ruin, the city of around 100,000 exists in limbo, suspended between cautious relief and fear that it will once again fall under the control of pro-Russian separatists.

The three-month rebel siege of the city represented the beginning of the war in eastern Ukraine. With parliamentary elections in Ukraine scheduled for October 26, there is widespread concern that Moscow-backed separatists will prevent voting in large swathes of the country, undermining the vote’s legitimacy. Their self-proclaimed government, the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), which claims authority over most of the Donetsk region, recently threatened to hold its own elections on November 2 in both Sloviansk and the Azov Sea city of Mariupol—the last two major cities in the eastern region to resist rebel control. Despite the signing of a ceasefire between separatists and the Ukrainian government in early September in Minsk, fighting in and around the city of Donetsk has persisted, killing Ukrainian soldiers, civilians, and a Swiss national working for the Red Cross. For the rebels, who are bent on creating what they and Moscow call Novorossiya—a historically loaded term to describe southeastern Ukraine—Sloviansk and the port city of Mariupol are strategically important.

In Aslanyan’s class of 40 psychology majors, whose grades she said have been negatively affected by the trauma of war, adolescent laughter quickly turned to stony silence when I asked how they were coping. “We’re afraid it will go back to how it was before,” said a teary-eyed 17-year-old student with thick black hair. The students spoke to me on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals. Her classmate, who sported a nose ring and towered over her peers at six feet, said she did not feel safe. “Even though the military are meant to protect us, seeing army trucks still freaks me out,” she said, referring to the scores of government soldiers, their automatic rifles taped in the blue and yellow colors of the national flag, manning the train station, main roads, and Sloviansk’s Central Square.

Stark reminders of the fighting are omnipresent: A memorial to a mass grave of civilians killed during the conflict sits in the city center, decorated with neon-colored plastic flowers; in the main cemetery, it is hard to miss the oblong mounds of 34 separatist graves, buried over June and July. Each Sunday afternoon, around 100 residents gather on the main square to rally support for Ukrainian troops. “We’re fed up of not being able to make plans,” a young man named Andrei told me at one such gathering. The group met by a large statue of Lenin with its neck wrapped in the Ukrainian flag, before marching around the center and chanting, “Sloviansk will stay in Ukraine!” Passing cars honked in solidarity.

A Ukrainian police officer outside Sloviansk

The encompassing feeling of uncertainty hints at how life could look across eastern Ukraine, regardless of whether the rebels or government forces ultimately win. Ukraine’s coal-heavy Donbass—comprising the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, traditionally the country’s industrial powerhouse—is under severe economic strain. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said earlier this month that the war had destroyed 40 percent of Donbass’s industrial potential. Through September of this year, Ukraine had mined half the amount of coal that it had during the same period last year, according to the country’s Independent Trade Union of Miners. In Sloviansk, major factories producing electricity and coking coal, used for heating and steelmaking, are working at half capacity, government officials said last month. Suspended projects—half-finished repairs to the sewage system, water pipes and sidewalks destroyed by war and awaiting fixes—dot the city, as if construction workers have gone to lunch en masse. ATM machines are often missing money for days on end, electricity is spotty, and public transportation has yet to be fully restored.

Meanwhile, global interest in the Ukraine crisis, which began with mass protests in Kiev nearly a year ago, has waned. Poroshenko’s high-profile visit to the United States in September resulted in plenty of standing ovations from Congress and $1 billion in financial guarantees, but no weapons. Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk said last month that he would “probably” ask for an increase to the country’s $17-billion bailout deal from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in light of war costs, but it's unclear if the IMF, which held its fall meeting with the World Bank last week, will respond to the request.

The eerie aftermath of fighting in eastern Ukraine

The village of Semyonovka just south of Sloviansk bears the worst scars from the fighting. As a result of its proximity to Sloviansk, Semyonovka was practically decimated by the rebel offensive on the city. Dirt roads are littered with household goods like teapots and towels, mixed with rocket casings and twisted metal. Former policeman Vakhid Mirzayev led me through the doorless entry of what was left of the home where he and his wife Nasiba raised their family. Their bed’s headboard was pockmarked by bullets, so much so that the pattern the holes made could be mistaken for part of the design. A large gray hole in the ceiling served as a reminder of an incendiary rocket.

“Each day I live with the horror [that the rebels will] come back. We’re so close to the line,” said Mirzayev, 50, exposing a row of glimmering gold teeth. Throughout June, he and Nasiba spent each day in their basement with two of their children and their grandchildren, who have since left the village for nearby Rostov-on-Don, in Russia. Mirzayev has written the word ‘empty’ in Russian on their blue basement door. “This way, they won’t try [to] take anything next time,” he explained. The shattered windows of the regional hospital, now abandoned, were visible above their garden, where some cabbages had broken through the earth.

Like half of the village, the Mirzayevs belong to a Muslim minority of Meskhetian Turks. Originally from Georgia’s border with Turkey, the Meskhetian Turks were deported to Uzbekistan by Stalin in 1944. Around 8,000 currently live in Ukraine. “We had finally, in these 70 years, found a peaceful home and then this happens,” said Nabijan Basadov, the thick-mustachioed regional head of Vatan, an international organization advocating for the repatriation of Meskhetian Turks. The 48-year-old veterinary doctor now spends most of the week in his boat-like Soviet-era car, ferrying food and goods to Meskhetian Turks in and around Semyonovka. “As a people, we are used to problems, having to live with horrors and stress,” he told me from the seat of his Volga, which rattled with bags of lamb bones and plastic containers of gasoline.

According to Basadov, 300 Meskhetian Turks have fled Sloviansk and the surrounding areas for Russia and Turkey over the past six months. He pointed to the abandoned house of the Mirzayevs’ former neighbors, who left for the Turkish city of Bursa in July. The shell of their home sat like a crumpled cardboard box. Meskhetian Turks around the world—their global population is thought to number 500,000—are preparing to commemorate the 70th anniversary of their deportation, on November 14. “Having to honor our people’s suffering, while being traumatized ourselves, just rubs salt in our wounds,” Basadov said. Vatan has managed to restore basic electricity to some of the community’s homes, but is waiting to rebuild. “We’d build if we had a guarantee it would be peaceful. But it’s a waiting game,” said Basadov, standing by a cement garage graffitied with the letters of the rebel government: "D-N-R."

Three days earlier, a mine planted during the fighting exploded nearby, injuring a small child. Nasiba, who had slept in her long corduroy skirt and red sweater for the previous two weeks as the nights turned cold, said she is in a constant battle with her 20-year-old daughter. “She calls all the time from Russia, crying down the phone, begging me to let her come back,” she told me. When I mentioned the ceasefire, Nasiba nervously drew her long braid over her mouth. “My daughter has these light, pretty eyes,” she said. “Anything could happen to her. And who knows if she can ever be safe here again.”

[MIKA27]

Will This Book End Football?

Football isn’t exactly on a hot streak right now. Between current NFL players beating their girlfriends and their kids, to college players sexually assaulting girls on campus, to high school players dying, to former players suing the NFL for brain damage and deception, some people are starting to question whether the sport is good for us

One of those people is Steve Almond. In his new book, Against Football: One Man’s Reluctant Manifesto, Almond (a New York Times bestselling author and lifelong Raiders fan) writes beautifully and thought-provokingly about his decision to give up watching a game he loves because of all the bad stuff that goes along with it. As Almond explains: “This book is a personal attempt to connect the two disparate synapses that fire in my brain when I hear the word ‘football’: the one that calls out, Who’s playing? What channel?, and the one that murmurs, Shame on you.”

We got Almond on the phone recently to talk more about his book and the many prickly issues surrounding our national obsession with football. As you’ll see, he had plenty to say.

In Against Football, you write about deciding to stop watching football. So we have to ask: do you miss it?

Oh, God, yeah. Of course. I love the game. I think it’s the most dramatically satisfying, compelling, just pleasurable sport to watch. So it’s like I’m an alcoholic. You know, I can’t be around booze. I’ve been trying to not go to certain websites, not wind up in a bar where a game would be on. If you’ve got the itch for it, and you recognize how beautiful and intricate it is, and just how great these guys are, graceful and athletic and brutal for the game’s purposes, it’s tough to look away.

Your family probably appreciates you giving up football, right?

Generally speaking, yeah. I would go out with my pal and spend three or four hours watching a game, and we liked it. One of the things I talk about in the book is football as a place of refuge from the disappointments and moral complexities of the adult world. And it’s powerful that way. It’s such an absorbing narrative, so dramatically satisfying. I could watch any game—two shitty college teams.

So it’s a tradeoff. I’m missing out on pleasure and relaxation, but I also don’t have to feel in bad conscience and I have more time to do things that might be a little more inconvenient, psychologically and emotionally, but are probably better use of my time.

So what would be the ideal reaction from the American public to your book?

The ideal reaction is not a mass boycott. The ideal reaction is not banning the game. I think the ideal reaction is for people to really look at football, not just as a form of entertainment, but as a moral undertaking. And to really see football for what it truly is: A beautiful, stirring, savage game that is also a huge business, has infiltrated our educational system in ways that I think are degrading to the educational mission, and has a set of values—racial values, gender values, sexual orientation values—that are wildly out of sync with how most people really, in 2014 America, feel about race, gender and sexuality.

And it’s a sport in which you have to suppress your empathy in order to enjoy it. So the desired outcome is not for anything to happen other than this: for individual fans who love the game to be in a state of moral struggle about whether the pleasure they take in the game is, for them, worth the moral outcomes and attitudes they aren’t okay with. I don’t want anybody to do anything other than see the game for what it is, then do as their own conscience recommends.

The problem is that football has not been treated as a moral undertaking, and we don’t really—at least I had never for 40 years—look at all the components of it. Every chapter in the book is trying to take on some aspect of the game, whether it’s race, or the way in which it fosters militarism, or the gender dynamics, or the way the industry that has grown up around the game damages cities by siphoning money from the public till that should be going to, you know, silly stuff like schools, infrastructure and economic development. It’s given straight to billionaire owners in the form of these shiny new stadiums and tax breaks.

Also, I want the country to start having a discussion about what it means that we need this beautiful, savage game to feel fully alive. And what it means that this is our biggest unifying narrative. This beautiful, savage game played mostly by huge African-American guys. That’s weird, don’t you think? That means something. So what does it mean? That’s what the book is trying to ask, from a number of angles.

The race issue is really interesting. It seems like college and pro football is getting more and more African-American, and maybe there’s this feeling among some white Americans that it’s not us out there getting concussions and brain damage.

You think about the SEC, where it was the heart of the Confederacy. You have college teams that are worshipped which are 80 percent African-American. So you say, okay, what’s that about? Is this a way of controlling? Is this about basically turning young kids of color into performers in this violent spectacle? Yes, there are things people get out of the sport. It unifies schools and gives people a feeling of togetherness and something to root for—all that stuff is true. But it’s also very odd and not a coincidence—it means something—that two-thirds of the players are African-American and most of the spectators are white.

You look at something like the NFL Combine. That’s highly monetized, and I know it’s part of the industry and so forth. But if you just looked at it and didn’t know the context, it would have the optics of a slave auction. It’s mostly white men looking at and inspecting the physical dimensions and prowess of young muscled African-American guys.

What are your thoughts on Roger Goodell? Is he the worst sports commissioner of our lifetime, as Bill Simmons has stated? The worst NFL commissioner ever?

Well, let’s say they get rid of Roger Goodell. Is the NFL not going to be a nihilistic, greedy, $10-billion-a-year industry in which the gender values are that women are sexual ornaments and men are giant muscled guys who use force to prove their worth in the world? Is Roger Goodell responsible for the fact that coaches all the way from Pop Warner through high school and college essentially look at kids—usually from economically vulnerable communities—and judge them purely based on whether they’re a good football player or not, on their physical prowess rather than the content of their character? That has nothing to do with Roger Goodell.

You know, Roger Goodell is a great commissioner in the sense that he made the NFL a lot of money. And that’s what his job was. He was the head of a huge corporation. I know it’s really tempting to scapegoat particular people like Roger Goodell, but ultimately the book is about the fundamental morals of the game and the corporation that exists around the game.

Roger Goodell has nothing to do with the fact that football is a huge part of public high schools. He has nothing to do with the fact that somehow football has become an intricate part of our system of higher education. That has nothing to do with Roger Goodell. And those are the sort of questions that the book is trying to engage. So Roger Goodell is not the point. Once Roger Goodell is gone, there’ll be some other suit who will be running the same huge corporation.

Some people like Colin Cowherd have argued that football provides young men from poor upbringings with a chance to go to college and, essentially, have a better life than they would have otherwise. What’s your response?

I just wrote a piece about this very issue for The Village Voice and in fact tried to say to Colin Cowherd, like, that it’s despicable and degrading to suggest that football is the pathway to economic opportunity for kids who don’t have other opportunities.

The whole point of the book in the chapter on race is saying, listen, one out of every 500 high school seniors who has the talent to play at that level is going to make it in the pros. They’re going to be there for three-and-a-half years, average, and they’re going to be broke several years afterwards. And if they get an education, it’s going to be incidental to the fact that they were a football player. The whole idea is to keep them eligible for game day so they can entertain us. It’s an utterly exploitative system, and it has absolutely no incentive to provide a better life for football players.

We only see the guys who are famous and who make a lot of money, and we obsess over those huge salaries. We never see the 499 kids who never make any money, although they put their lives and health at risk, and we certainly don’t see the guys—or they try to keep out of view the guys—who wind up with dementia, with bodies that can barely walk, with whatever else.

So I could not find that view more degrading and despicable. It’s a distraction from the fundamental inability of our culture to create real economic opportunity in communities that are economically vulnerable. It’s saying, “Hey, maybe the best way is to have this lottery ticket for one out of 500 kids, and by the way, you have to be a boy, and you have to be a boy who can play football. The reason you’re going to get that economic opportunity has nothing to do with the development of your intellectual or moral sense in the world. It’s purely about whether you can hit the running back hard enough to put him out of the game.”

Do you think the NFL will ever become extinct, and if so, when?

No. Football means too much to too many people to go extinct. What could happen, though, is that more casual fans could turn away from the game or cut down on their consumption. The industry would contract rather than disappear. When and how that might happen, and how quickly, is anybody’s guess.

It depends on a bunch of unknowable contingencies. Will a famous former player—a guy like Brett Favre or Steve Young—admit on TV that he has incipient dementia? Will a top-level player at the pro or college level be paralyzed or even killed during a game, or practice? Will someone sue a public high school, or district, for allowing kids to play a game as dangerous as football? To what extent will individual fans start to view the game not just as an enthralling form of entertainment, but as a moral undertaking with real moral costs? That’s the central aim of my book.

I’m under no illusions on this. Football is the biggest thing in America. But boxing was among the most popular sports in America a century ago and now it’s more of a fringe sport. Why? Because individual fans turned away from it, because it was too overtly brutal.

On a lighter note, have you taken up soccer at all?

Ha ha. Well, I did play soccer as a kid. But honestly, I think part of writing the book was also about realizing, “Hey, you know what? I’d rather be playing sports. I’d rather be engaged in something that’s more connecting me to my family, my community, whatever it is.” Like, it’s such a decadent thing to sit on a couch and watch other people do exercise. I know that there’s also this stirring drama that’s happening, but fundamentally, that’s what’s happening. People sit on couches and watch other people do these amazing things. And it’s like, “Hey, how about getting off the couch and doing your own amazing things?” Even if it’s just running a half marathon or a 5K. Or just reading a book to your kid.

[MIKA27]

Turkey OK’s American Drones to Fight ISIS

Turkey is now allowing the U.S. to launch unmanned aircraft to fly over Syria. But so far, traditional warplanes are out of the question.

Send in the drones. But keep the manned aircraft at home.

That’s the message from the Turkish government to the U.S.-led coalition bombing ISIS and other extremists in Syria.

Despite some recent signals from the Turkish government that it was finally ready to partner with the United States and others in the new war against ISIS, there is still a major snag.

U.S. officials working on the diplomacy and intelligence components of the new war tell The Daily Beast that Ankara is still prohibiting the United States from flying manned aircraft from the U.S. airbase in Incirlik, Turkey. Instead, the Turks are allowing only drones to take off from the base.

“They are letting us do a ton of signals work,” a U.S. official working the issue said, using military jargon for the interception of hostile communications. “They have not objected to just about anything on the surveillance side. The fights have been about manned aircraft coming in and out.” The dispute over flying the manned aircraft has been a source of considerable tensions behind the scenes since the U.S. campaign against ISIS began in August. But the outlines of that dispute spilled out into the open this week.

National Security Advisor Susan Rice said Oct. 13 on Meet the Press that Turkey had agreed to let its bases be used in the fight against ISIS, but several senior Turkish officials rushed to deny Rice’s claim. “There is no decision at the moment concerning Incirlik or any other issue,” Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said the next day. Turkey has publicly called for a no-fly zone and for airstrikes against the Assad regime.

On Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry claimed that the U.S. and Turkey were on the same page. “[Turkey] certainly has allowed the use of certain facilities, and we don’t need to get into specifics except to say that I don’t believe there is any discrepancy with respect to what they will or won’t do,” he said.

But White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday that there was still no formal agreement between the U.S. and Turkey over using Turkish bases in the fight against ISIS. “This issue of military bases in Turkey is an issue that continues to be discussed between American officials and Turkish officials,” he said.

One U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast that overall Turkey has been willing to allow the United States to fly drones out of Incirlik but has not allowed the United States to fly manned aircraft. Instead, those missions have been flown from other locations and from aircraft carriers stationed in the region.

Another U.S. official working on the new war against ISIS and al-Nusra confirmed this information. Both sources requested anonymity because they were discussing classified information.

The Turkish press has also reported that some drones are flying out of Turkey. “There are activities that we are already undertaking jointly from Incirlik, concerning Iraq: the Predators, the reconnaissance flights can continue,” Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu told Milliyet earlier this month, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles. “But as a base for a more extensive operation — if they are expecting the contribution of any country — we have already made our position clear: there has to be a no-fly zone and a safe haven must be declared,” he said.

The Incirlik base is important. In 2011, after Obama ordered all U.S. troops out of Iraq, some of the most sensitive military aircraft, drones, blimps and other sensors housed in Iraq were positioned at the Incirlik base. In the 1990s the U.S. flew missions over northern Iraq when Saddam Hussein was in control of that country from the Incirlik air base.

Turkey has been a fair weather ally against ISIS and al-Nusra as well. U.S. officials have publicly testified in the last year that new western recruits often travel through Turkey to get to Syria to join ISIS and al-Nusra. U.S. officials now say Turkey has started to take steps to cut down on the number of foreign fighters traveling through Turkey into Syria.

Ret. Gen. John Allen, the President’s designated coordinator for the anti-ISIS coalition, told reporters Tuesday that a team of military officials from Central Command and European Command were still in negotiations but nothing has been settled.

“The conversation with respect to how those kinds of details will ultimately be resolved is underway right now,” Allen said, noting that Turkey has made some additional commitments to the coalition, such as agreeing in principle to host one of the bases that will be used to train and equip Syrian rebels.

Spokesmen for the Pentagon and CIA refused to comment for this story. Patrick Ventrell, a spokesman for Rice, declined to explain why the National Security Advisor announced that the Turks had agreed to open permissions for the use of their bases. But there is broad agreement between Washington and Ankara as to how the fight against ISIS should proceed, he said.