PWG Writers Archive: jcmbjd

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Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Why The U.S. Cares About Uninhabited Islands in the East China Sea

Image courtesy of Wikimedia via Creative
Commons License, Jackopoid

Yesterday, Eric Posner wrote a compelling and helpful article on Slate about the simmering conflict between China and Japan over the Senkaku Islands (or Diaoyu Islands from the Chinese perspective). In his analysis Japan has the stronger claim by International Law, but also concedes that such norms men little to China, and that much of geopolitics is still might makes right.

While friction between China and Japan warrants international attention, both diplomatic and otherwise, why strategically, should the Unites States care? The primary reason is that the first major crisis to test the “pivot to Asia” that President Obama has initiated may not happen in North Korea, but in the East China Sea.

The islands aren’t just the subject of a dispute between staunch U.S. ally Japan and longtime “frenemy” China, but are also hugely symbolically important to Taiwan and its international status. These islands are 170 km off the coast of Taiwan. China’s claims to the islands rest on the islands being part of the breakaway province of Taiwan. Taiwan of course still considers itself the rightful government of all of China in exile, in its official rhetoric, but popular opinion favors a Taiwan as an independent country. Taiwan also thinks the islands belong to it.

While the U.S. recognizes Beijing as the official government of China, the Taiwan straight has long been a line in the sea that the U.S. does not want Beijing to cross. Conflict between any of these actors would bring the U.S. into conflict with China as a result of treaty obligations and strategic interest. The situation is not completely dissimilar to the global web of alliances that helped bring about World War I.

The islands are used as fishing grounds and may have a variety of oil and natural gas deposits, but mostly they are symbolic of global and regional strength. China is still trying to overcome its epoch of humiliation when Japan and the Western powers exploited a weak and corrupt government.

Whatever happens here, the strength of the U.S.’s commitment to its pivot to Asia will be tested.

Another excellent article about this conflict can be found at the National Geographic website.
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Jason McBride is the creator of the Intellectual Ninja and the Scourge of Scoundrels series. He is also the author of Watch Out For Sneaker Waves. He is currently hard at work on his first book of fiction, available Spring 2014.

He is the proud father of four amazing children and the happy husband of one wife. He aspires to be an extreme sleeper.

Ukraine May Test Limits of U.S. Relationship With Russia

Image courtesy of Wikimedia and United Nations Cartography Division

The recent political crisis in Ukraine is likely to test the limits of the U.S.’s relationship with Russia. Signs of mounting tension surfaced when earlier this week CNN reported earlier that Secretary of State Kerry asked the Russians to refrain from using military force in Ukraine.

The last time a major political crisis erupted in a former Soviet republic with a large Russian speaking population, Russia rolled out the tanks to “protect” Russians in the South Ossetia region of Georgia. There was a lot of international diplomatic hand wringing back in 2008, but six years later the Russian military is still present in South Ossetia, although it is authorized through a bi-lateral agreement. Not that Georgia had a lot of bargaining power during the treaty negotiations.

Today the AP and Reuters are reporting that Putin is putting the Russian military forces in western and central Russia on alert.

Ukraine is a physical buffer between Eastern Europe and Russia. It is also a political and cultural buffer. The western half of Ukraine looks to Europe and yearns to integrate and share in its economic success. The Ukrainian-speaking majority considers their homeland traditionally part of Europe. The eastern half of Ukraine is predominantly Russian speaking and looks to Russia with a nostalgia for empire. Ukraine has been in the Russian orbit for most of the past 300 years.

The cool eyes of Vladimir Putin match the gaze of the Ukrainian Russians and share their nostalgia for empire. Former Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, recently forced from power, was Putin’s man. Putin does not trust the pro-European forces sure to take over Ukraine, and he seems to have a special dislike for previously jailed, but recently freed, opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko.

The worry of many in Europe and the United States is that Russia will use the turmoil in its neighbor to intervene and force a split between the Russian and Ukrainian halves of the country. Russia could either absorb the Russian speaking provinces of Ukraine into Russia, or set up a puppet state, harkening back to the Cold War. Either way the Russians would be able to move its military forces closer to Europe.

What is not known is how much influence the U.S, has or is willing to exert in the crisis. The U.S. has to balance its need for Russian cooperation in Syria, Iran and North Korea with its other strategic objections to wider expansion of Russian power into Europe.

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He is the proud father of four amazing children and the happy husband of one wife. He aspires to be an extreme sleeper.

Monday, February 24, 2014

Artemisia Gentileschi, Intellectual Ninja and Forgotten Baroque Master

Artemisia Gentileschi
Painter, Women's Right's Advocate
Intellectual Ninja

Gentileschi painted for royalty and the mighty Medicis, produced emotionally charged work that was, and still is, controversial for its portrayals of sex and violence. Gentileschi is one of the best painters to follow the Great Baroque Master, Caravaggio. She was also ninja enough to be the first woman admitted to the prestigious and all but impossible to get into Academia di Arte del Disegno (Academy of Fine Arts) in Florence.

She was the victim of a sexual assault, and in a brave and unusual move for her time she assisted in the prosecution of her assailant, even though it meant being tortured with thumbscrews. The torture was just to make sure she was telling the truth.

Artemisia Gentileschi reminds us that not all the Great Masters were men, and

Judith Slaying Holofernes

that genius doesn't care about gender. Her works dealt with challenging themes that still resonate today. Her story reminds us far we have come with human rights, and how far we still have to go. Click here to read the rest of Artemisia Gentileschi's story.

Click here to learn about other Intellectual Ninjas.

If you are more interested in people who lived on the other side of the law, you may be interested in my Scourge of Scoundrels series:

Ching Shih, She Was The World's Greatest Pirate

Jefferson "Soapy" Smith, The Greatest Con Man in the West

Some material was previously published on Bubblews, and appears here with permission.
All images are in the public domain, or are used with permission. All rights reserved.

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He is the proud father of four amazing children and the happy husband of one wife. He aspires to be an extreme sleeper.

Friday, February 21, 2014

Scourge of Scoundrels #2: Jefferson “Soapy” Smith, The Greatest Con Man in the West

The Robber Barons of the Gilded Age and the Monopolists of the early 20^th Century were not the first ones to build an empire with vertical integration and synergies. No, the true business pioneer who invented these techniques was a bearded con man born Jefferson Randolph Smith II. Many knew him as Soapy Smith

Soapy Smith ran Denver, Colorado for almost eight years in the 1880’s. He was no lone wolf either. He had a handpicked crew of scoundrels working for him. His greatest innovation was learning to cultivate the right people in the community so instead of being wandering drifters and grifters, the Soapy Smith Gang set up shop permanently.

What He Did:

Soapy Smith arrived in Denver in 1879. By the time he left Denver for good he owned a good chunk of the business district including a saloon, a (fake) lottery shop, a “stock” exchange, a cigar store that was also a front for an illegal poker club, a counterfeit jewelry store, and a small office that sold stock in non-existent businesses.

Soapy Smith also controlled the police force, the mayor, and most of the city council of Denver. He ran the elections, always ensuring the “right” man won.

Soapy was not all about himself. He also built churches, donated to charity freely, and paid for the occasional prostitute’s funeral expenses. He was regularly called upon by at least one Denver clergymen to help organize food drives and for donations to financially strapped parishioners.

When the heat got too hot in Denver, Soapy Smith and his gang headed out to Creede, Colorado to take advantage of a nearby silver strike. There he used his connections with local prostitutes to convince influential civic leaders and businessmen to sign over most of Main Street to him while he turned around and leased the properties to his friends and allies.

He left Creede just before most of the business district burned down and spent a little while longer in Denver.

After almost triggering a civil war in Denver, he left and headed to Skagway, Alaska where he begin to build yet another criminal empire.

During the Spanish American War Soapy formed a volunteer army with the approval of the United States government and got himself the rank of Captain with a letter to President McKinley.

How He Did It:

Soapy started his career with an ingenious scam. He would stand outside the train station in Denver where travelers where coming into town, looking to get washed up and find a hotel. He sold them soap. He would take ordinary soap and sell it for 25 cents a piece. Of course the soap could be bought at a local store for 5 cents. Once he gathered a big crowd, Soapy would wrap the bars in tissue paper and make a big show of placing a $100 bill in a wrapped bar of soap. Then he would place a $50 bill and a $20 bill in other wrapped bars of soap. One of his gang would buy a bar and show how he had won.

The travelers quickly started buying the soap. Through careful slight of hand only the ringers ever won. Many travelers would buy multiple bars trying to recoup their losses.

If the crowd was really big, he would start auctioning off the remaining bars of soap, again ensuring he knew the winning bidder for the $100 bar of soap.

Soapy also operated games of “chance” like three card monte, at all of his businesses. So someone coming into the cigar store for a rigged poker game would often play three-card monte while he waited for a table, loosing more money. The same would be true at the stock exchange, where the only thing that was exchanged was money and hot air.

Soapy assembled an all-star gang of conmen and grifters including legends like Texas Jack Vermilion and “Big” Ed Burns.

Soapy got the support of the community by only targeting tourists and being a generous citizen. He also had most of the police on politicians on the take.

Back Story:

Soapy was born in Georgia to a wealthy plantation family that was financially ruined by the Civil War. They moved to Texas where he saw outlaw Sam Bass get gunned down in Ft. Worth. He left home as a teenager and moved right into the life of a conman.

How It Ended:

Soapy Smith eventually found a game he couldn’t fix. His associates were operating a game of three-card monte. A miner balked at paying his heavy losses at what he rightly assumed was a rigged game.

The associates during the argument liberated $2,700 worth of gold from the miner.

When Soapy refused to refund the gold, a local committee requested a meeting at the Juneau Wharf. At that meeting an argument broke out and Soapy was fatally shot, but he did manage to take out one of the committee member before going down.

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Scourge of Scoundrels is a series about the women and men in history who never let a little thing like rules or the law keep them from getting what they wanted.

Click here for Scourge of Scoundrels #1: Ching Shih, She Was the World’s Greatest Pirate

You may also like my series Intellectual Ninjas.

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He is the proud father of four amazing children and the happy husband of one wife. He aspires to be an extreme sleeper.

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Intellectual Ninja Index

Intellectual Ninja is a series of posts about people who are not only brilliant, but also brilliant in previously unheard of ways. These are people that have influenced and shaped our civilization. They are also amazingly cool. Below you will find a gallery of the Intellectual Ninja posts with brief descriptions and links to the full posts. Please feel free to nominate candidates for future posts.

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau
Poet, Writer, Naturalist,
Botanist, War Protester, and
Intellectual Ninja

Thoreau was a genius. He was Harvard educated and could have been anything he wanted to be. The most likely occupations for him seemed to be that of lawyer or clergyman. He rejected both of these and instead became an Intellectual Ninja.

Thoreau wrote amazing and stunning poetry. Most of his subjects were related to nature. He was one of the foremost experts on New England ecology and botany in his day. Incidentally, ecology didn’t even really exist as a discipline in the early to mid 1800’s. Thoreau helped invent it.

He is one of the most influential thinkers ever. He has been a source of inspiration for several Nobel Peace Prize winners. Click here to read more about how one-of-a-kind awesome Henry David Thoreau was.

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson
Poet, Master of Stealth, and
Intellectual Ninja

Emily Dickinson was so ninja, almost nobody knew she was one of the world’s most amazing poets until after her death. During her lifetime only ten or eleven of her poems were published. After her death it was discovered that she had written over 1800 different poems.

She wrote in a style much different from what was common in poetry during her lifetime. She used a different rhyme scheme. She also rarely used titles and experimented with punctuation and capitalization. She was probably one of the first modern poets, even though that movement wouldn’t officially begin until well after her death. Click here to find out how Dickinson turned poetry on its head.

Philo T. Farnsworth

Philo T. Farnsworth
Inventor, Father of
Television, and
Intellectual Ninja

What were you doing when you were thirteen years old? Farnsworth was plowing his family’s farm near Rigby, Idaho inventing the framework for the television. His ideas would remain a part of every television manufactured through almost the entire 20^th century. He also, on his own, found an old burnt out motor at their new farm, took it apart, and used the pieces to convert his mother’s handmade washing machine into an electric one. He also won $25 for inventing a magnetized car lock.

Farnsworth later sketched out his ideas for a completely electronic television on the blackboard for his high school chemistry teacher. Philo T. Farnsworth wasn't afraid of anybody and went toe-to-toe with one of the most powerful media companies of his time. Click here to find out how Farnsworth defeated this giant.

Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace
Mathematician, Coder,
Computer Visionary, and
Intellectual Ninja

Coders are all the rage these days, but Ada Lovelace would probably find them so 19th century. She was ninja enough to write an algorithm to compute a sequence of Bernoulli numbers in 1842 and 1843. That’s a solid 100 plus years before ENIAC, the world’s first electronic general purpose computer. By the way, Bernoulli numbers are a too complex to explain here so you can read about them here.

Lovelace wasn’t just some Victorian era mathematician and coder; she also completely understood the power of computers long before the rest of the world did. Follow this link to learn more about this genius and her prophetic vision for what computers would become.

Gandhi

Gandhi
Peace Activist,
Lawyer, Civil Rights Leader, and
Intellectual Ninja

Born Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, but known to the world as Gandhi, this Intellectual Ninja maybe the most amazing of them all. Gandhi defeated the British Empire with the power of his mind. He liberated approximately 12% of the entire world’s population, without firing a shot. He won a British War Medal without being a soldier.

Gandhi was from the Merchant caste in India and was educated as a lawyer. Early in his life he work in South Africa where he fought for the civil rights of Indians living there. He formed his dedication to the cause of non-violent civil disobedience there, even though he has attacked by mobs, jailed, and beaten repeatedly. To read how Gandhi won his war medal click here.

Marie Curie

Marie Curie
Scientist, Double Nobel Prize Winner,
Author, Medical-
Pioneer and
Intellectual Ninja

Winning a Nobel Prize is pretty ninja. Wining two Nobel Prizes makes you an elite Intellectual Ninja. Winning two Nobel Prizes in two different sciences makes you Marie Curie. Curie performed her work at a time where women were discouraged from even getting educated in most of the world, did not have to right to vote in most western democracies, and were often seen as simply an extension of the men in their lives. Curie wasn’t having any of that.

Curie’s scientific discoveries changed the course of history by opening the way for advanced medical treatments. She served as a radiologist in a war zone. Her philanthropy continues to save lives today through the two advanced medical research institutes she founded. Oh yeah, she also wrote an amazing cookbook. However her cookbook and many of her scientific papers are too radioactive to touch. Click here to learn more about Marie Curie.

Roger Tomlinson

Roger Tomlinson
Geographer, Geoligist,
Innovator and
Intellectual Ninja

Have you ever used Google Maps, your cell phone, or a hand held GPS unit to find anything? If so you can thank Roger Tomlinson. He was ninja enough to invent a new field of study and discipline, Geographic Information Systems (GIS). This British genius led Canada to create the first computerized GIS system in the world.

Tomlinson got his start on changing the way the world thinks about maps when he was working for a private company in Canada with a government contract. He hit a seemingly impassable obstacle working on an aid project when he changed the world. Follow this link to find out how Tomlinson solved his problem and paved the way for GPS.

All images in public domain or created by me, all rights reserved
Some content previously appeared on Bubblews, appears here with permission

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He is the proud father of four amazing children and the happy husband of one wife. He aspires to be an extreme sleeper.

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Scourge of Scoundrels #1: Ching Shih, She Was the World’s Greatest Pirate

What makes a pirate great? A chest full of gold, a fleet of ships, and a brutal and bloodthirsty crew are a good start. The pirate Ching Shih, or the Widow Ching, had more gold, more power, more ships, and tougher crews than any other pirate ever. She was also one of the very few pirates in the history of the world to retire and die of age related complications.

She makes Blackbeard and Captain Kidd look like little boys trying to play pirate.

What She Did:

The Widow Ching commanded an armada of between 400 and 1200 ships with between 50,000 to 70,000 pirates under her command at any one time.

She was the most powerful naval force in the South China Sea. She defeated the Qing dynasty’s handpicked naval armada, sinking or capturing 63 of their ships, and allowing only enough survivors to ensure word got back to the Emperor about how horrible the battle had been.

Her Red Flag Fleet blockaded the Portuguese city of Macao, and took everything of value out. The Portuguese dispatched a fleet to deal with the pirates. The Portuguese fleet was crushed.

She also soundly defeated a British fleet created for the sole purpose of destroying her.

After their defeats, the British and Portuguese declined to go directly after Widow Ching’s pirate empire.

Her power was so great that some costal towns paid their taxes to her instead of the government.

She did anything she wanted in the South China Sea and its costal towns and villages.

How She Did It:

The Widow Ching was ruthless and cunning. She introduced accounting standards into the pirate fleet. Everything was recorded and put into the treasury. Every pirate got their share based upon rank and time of service. Her accounting was clean and transparent.

She also had a strict pirate code for her fleet. If anyone stole from the treasury, or tried to keep some treasure for himself without the proper paperwork, he was beheaded. If a pirate was insubordinate and failed to follow a direct order, he was beheaded. If anyone tried to freelance and issue their own orders he was beheaded.

If a pirate deserted his ship or took any unauthorized leave, he was hunted down and had their ears cut off. Then he was paraded around the ship in front of the crew so everyone could see what a coward he was.

Ching Shih had special rules about captives. Anyone raping a captive would be killed. Beautiful captives could be taken as wives or concubines, but any infidelity was punished by death. If any sexual relations were had while a pirate was on duty, the pirate would be beheaded, and if the relationship were consensual, the women would be chained with cannonballs and tossed into the sea.

Ugly captives were released back to shore.

In battle, male captives could choose to follow the pirate code and join the crew or be killed on the spot.

Back Story:

Ching Shih first enters the written record in 1801 when the dreaded pirate Ching Yi captured her. He was so smitten by his captured prostitute that he made her his wife. But Ching Shih was not just a pretty face, and was not content with staying indoors all day, awaiting her man. She quickly became a partner in her husband’s piracy. By 1804 her husband’s fleet, known as the Red Flag Fleet, was the most powerful pirate fleet in the area.. The Chings also took rival pirate fleets and formed a confederation, further consolidating their power.

In 1807 Ching Yi had the misfortune to be on the wrong side of a typhoon and was killed in present day Vietnam. The Widow Ching worked quickly to consolidate her power.

She personally contacted the most powerful pirate captains in the confederation and secured their loyalty. She also quickly entered into a romantic relationship with her husband’s former second in command, his adopted son, Chang Pao. The two were fiercely loyal to each other. He helped institute his wife’s code and accounting regulations.

How Did It End:

The Chinese empire couldn’t get anyone to hunt Ching Shih down, and so they offered her, and most of her pirates, amnesty. Ching Shih took the offer, opened up a casino and brothel and lived peacefully until she died at age 69. She even got to keep her spoils.

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Scourge of Scoundrels is a series about the women and men in history who never let a little thing like rules or the law keep them from getting what they wanted.