the philippines was gorgeous, and just what i needed. i can’t wait to go back.

alas, all good things must come to an end.

2009 is in the books. best wishes for 2010.

i was looking through the pictures on the new york times‘ recap of the past decade, Documenting the Decade, and a couple photos really struck me. what struck me wasn’t necessarily their beauty, but their meaning.

what strikes me so much about this one is not just the breathtaking beauty of the canadian rockies, but also the photo’s caption, which reads “Since I first visited the Canadian Rockies in the late 1970s, the Athabasca Glacier has receded several miles. However, to put things in perspective, geolocial markers that date back to the 19th century show that the glacier has been receding for centuries. Whether glaciers demonstrate that the past decade is meaningful or not, I leave to Nature to argue. And, while many glaciers are melting, others are stable or even growing in the Himalayas and Alaska. There is no question that there is global climate change. The biggest problem … it has always been so.”

look at the raccoon, staring with fascination at the photographer, as if to ask “what does that thing do?” every time i see a picture like this, it reminds me how precious and beautiful even the littlest of critters is, and how much like us they really are. or rather, how much like them we really are. it shocks me every time i hear people debate whether or not animals can really think or feel in the same way we do. is the raccoon’s expression any different from that of a baby who has just seen something new for the first time? conversely, is our animalistic side so much different from the raccoon’s?

statements like this are a slap in the face to me and everyone who makes a conscious choice to serve their country. many, like me, with degrees from prestigious universities have willingly sacrificed far higher paying jobs in the civilian world, gone far away from our homes and families, have forgone personal comforts that most americans take for granted, and have laid it all on the line, including our lives. even my soldiers who do not have a college degree have left their homes as young as seventeen. these men and women are great americans, who wear their uniforms with pride. the ones worth their salt, anyways.

it is not that we are asking too much of this generation — it’s that we aren’t asking anything of this generation, leaving the entire burden to be shouldered by a select few. what the hell has this generation done to deserve the luxuries it feels so entitled to? twitter?! television?! video games? text messaging?! all while sitting around getting so fat that their very health is jeopardized by their laziness?! so what has this generation done? at most, self-serving, self-gratifying but ultimately empty finger-pointing, protests, and agitation over issues they might actually understand if they were willing to dig deeper intellectually than wikipedia.

for all i’ve heard about the war in iraq and afghanistan, whose war is it really? whose lives has it really impacted? is there a draft? of those who say they suppost the troops, who amongst them has ever raised their hand to serve their country and see what is really going on? do most families even have a single service member amongst them? it is mere lip service. this isn’t this generations’ war, because it doesn’t really mean a damn thing to them, and they have never felt any direct impacts beyond a few minor inconveniences. this is a soldier’s war — a burden and experience shared by them alone, along with their families and the iraqi and afghani people. these are the ones who preserve and embody the american spirit and make america great, not the public.

true, not everyone is called to serve their country in the form of military service, but at least do something! join the peace corps. become a civil servant. plant a public garden. volunteer some time and money to a local food shelter or humanitarian organization and give back to society. check on your damn neighbor. live responsibly. until then, you haven’t earned the right to voice your opinion.

…

and to close it all out, an excellent quote by stephen colbert from TIME’s Top 10 Everything of 2009:

“Twitter went down today. If only there was some short, shallow, self-indulgent way to express my horror.”

—Stephen Colbert, sniffing at the year’s biggest online fad

Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks

hilarious

well it didn’t start snowing until christmas night, but it’s been pretty snowy and wintery ever since — the first real snow of the season.

ice on the han river, seoul [joongang daily]

it’s actually not been that bad so far. sure it’s in the frigid single digits fahrenheit, but it hasn’t been excessively windy. it has, however, been extremely icy, which makes it hell walking up and down the mountains to my barracks building and office. and apparently, driving as well:

someone is going to have some body work to do on the underside of the chassis….

seven days until the philippines, sixteen days until my challenger srt8 gets to korea!!!

courtesy of ROK Drop:

Naked News Korea Girls Start New K-Pop Band, The Naked Girls

I am sure everyone has been awaiting in anticipation to see what would happen to the unemployed Naked News Korea girls and now we have our answer, K-Pop!:

“We have gathered Minkyung, Jaekyung, Hyeji and Taehee to form this girl group, and will officially debut under the name Naked Girls in January next year. Their performances will be composed of inappropriate songs and choreography, definitely not suitable for youth. The girls’ activities will be focused more on musicals rather than national television.”  [Extra Korea]

Here is more on the group’s signature calling card, “the sexy cal“.

You can see more pictures of the girls here.

the end of ‘09 marks both the end of the year and the end of the first decade of the 2000s. rather than reflect on all that has happened thus far, this is what i would like to see in the coming decade:

- a real commitment to alternative energy and cleaner, more efficient ways to burn fossil fuels, which reduces our dependence not only on foreign oil, but on oil altogether

- a focus on water conservation, environmentally sustainable agriculture and logging, and reclamation of land that has fallen victim to desertification. it’s going to be expensive, but sooner or later, we’re going to have to face up to these problems. the next great struggle isn’t going to be over oil but over water.

- greater transparency in our government and on wall street. i work for the government, so does that mean i trust it? hell no! if i am going to die for my country, it damn well better be for the right reasons. and if my taxpayer dollars are going to taken from my paycheck, it damn well better be for something truly important — not to bail out some corrupt corporation that is so inept it can’t survive on its own. fuck that corporation! let it die and let it be replaced by one that knows what the hell its doing.

- sustainable spending habits. people are finally starting to save instead of living well outside their means and living on borrowed credit. hallelujah! now it’s time for our government to follow suit. if frivolous spending habits are what caused the recession, then in what way does it possibly make sense that the government — already at a $12 trillion deficit — can solve the problem by spending even more?!

- parents actually having the chutzpah to do the right thing!!! this sense of entitlement kids today feel has got to go. no one owes you anything. if you really want something, go out and make it happen. but with most kids spending more time in the virtual world than the real world, i’m not too optimistic…

- james takes delivery of his brand new challenger srt8, buys his first of many houses, and makes it out of afghanistan alive.

- james gets married. james has kids.

- james possibly starts working on a law degree, paying his way through school on the government’s dime, or on a stock portfolio which increases by an average of 30% (a little overly hopeful on the return perhaps, but one can dream…)

- victory

vegans are so full of themselves

December 22, 2009
Basics
Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too
By NATALIE ANGIER

www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/science/22angi.html

I stopped eating pork about eight years ago, after a scientist happened to mention that the animal whose teeth most closely resemble our own is the pig. Unable to shake the image of a perky little pig flashing me a brilliant George Clooney smile, I decided it was easier to forgo the Christmas ham. A couple of years later, I gave up on all mammalian meat, period. I still eat fish and poultry, however and pour eggnog in my coffee. My dietary decisions are arbitrary and inconsistent, and when friends ask why I’m willing to try the duck but not the lamb, I don’t have a good answer. Food choices are often like that: difficult to articulate yet strongly held. And lately, debates over food choices have flared with particular vehemence.

In his new book, “Eating Animals,” the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer describes his gradual transformation from omnivorous, oblivious slacker who “waffled among any number of diets” to “committed vegetarian.” Last month, Gary Steiner, a philosopher at Bucknell University, argued on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times that people should strive to be “strict ethical vegans” like himself, avoiding all products derived from animals, including wool and silk. Killing animals for human food and finery is nothing less than “outright murder,” he said, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “eternal Treblinka.”

But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants — their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar — the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze. It’s time for a green revolution, a reseeding of our stubborn animal minds.

When plant biologists speak of their subjects, they use active verbs and vivid images. Plants “forage” for resources like light and soil nutrients and “anticipate” rough spots and opportunities. By analyzing the ratio of red light and far red light falling on their leaves, for example, they can sense the presence of other chlorophyllated competitors nearby and try to grow the other way. Their roots ride the underground “rhizosphere” and engage in cross-cultural and microbial trade.

“Plants are not static or silly,” said Monika Hilker of the Institute of Biology at the Free University of Berlin. “They respond to tactile cues, they recognize different wavelengths of light, they listen to chemical signals, they can even talk” through chemical signals. Touch, sight, hearing, speech. “These are sensory modalities and abilities we normally think of as only being in animals,” Dr. Hilker said.

Plants can’t run away from a threat but they can stand their ground. “They are very good at avoiding getting eaten,” said Linda Walling of the University of California, Riverside. “It’s an unusual situation where insects can overcome those defenses.” At the smallest nip to its leaves, specialized cells on the plant’s surface release chemicals to irritate the predator or sticky goo to entrap it. Genes in the plant’s DNA are activated to wage systemwide chemical warfare, the plant’s version of an immune response. We need terpenes, alkaloids, phenolics — let’s move.

“I’m amazed at how fast some of these things happen,” said Consuelo M. De Moraes of Pennsylvania State University. Dr. De Moraes and her colleagues did labeling experiments to clock a plant’s systemic response time and found that, in less than 20 minutes from the moment the caterpillar had begun feeding on its leaves, the plant had plucked carbon from the air and forged defensive compounds from scratch.

Just because we humans can’t hear them doesn’t mean plants don’t howl. Some of the compounds that plants generate in response to insect mastication — their feedback, you might say — are volatile chemicals that serve as cries for help. Such airborne alarm calls have been shown to attract both large predatory insects like dragon flies, which delight in caterpillar meat, and tiny parasitic insects, which can infect a caterpillar and destroy it from within.

Enemies of the plant’s enemies are not the only ones to tune into the emergency broadcast. “Some of these cues, some of these volatiles that are released when a focal plant is damaged,” said Richard Karban of the University of California, Davis, “cause other plants of the same species, or even of another species, to likewise become more resistant to herbivores.”

Yes, it’s best to nip trouble in the bud.

Dr. Hilker and her colleagues, as well as other research teams, have found that certain plants can sense when insect eggs have been deposited on their leaves and will act immediately to rid themselves of the incubating menace. They may sprout carpets of tumorlike neoplasms to knock the eggs off, or secrete ovicides to kill them, or sound the S O S. Reporting in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Hilker and her coworkers determined that when a female cabbage butterfly lays her eggs on a brussels sprout plant and attaches her treasures to the leaves with tiny dabs of glue, the vigilant vegetable detects the presence of a simple additive in the glue, benzyl cyanide. Cued by the additive, the plant swiftly alters the chemistry of its leaf surface to beckon female parasitic wasps. Spying the anchored bounty, the female wasps in turn inject their eggs inside, the gestating wasps feed on the gestating butterflies, and the plant’s problem is solved.

Here’s the lurid Edgar Allan Poetry of it: that benzyl cyanide tip-off had been donated to the female butterfly by the male during mating. “It’s an anti-aphrodisiac pheromone, so that the female wouldn’t mate anymore,” Dr. Hilker said. “The male is trying to ensure his paternity, but he ends up endangering his own offspring.”

Plants eavesdrop on one another benignly and malignly. As they described in Science and other journals, Dr. De Moraes and her colleagues have discovered that seedlings of the dodder plant, a parasitic weed related to morning glory, can detect volatile chemicals released by potential host plants like the tomato. The young dodder then grows inexorably toward the host, until it can encircle the victim’s stem and begin sucking the life phloem right out of it. The parasite can even distinguish between the scents of healthier and weaker tomato plants and then head for the hale one.

“Even if you have quite a bit of knowledge about plants,” Dr. De Moraes said, “it’s still surprising to see how sophisticated they can be.”

It’s a small daily tragedy that we animals must kill to stay alive. Plants are the ethical autotrophs here, the ones that wrest their meals from the sun. Don’t expect them to boast: they’re too busy fighting to survive.

that being said, i’m a big proponent of ethical eating, or more generally, ethical consumption. it’s important to treat all life with reverence and to act in ways such that life flourishes. life really is the most precious resource, and it’s the one thing that once taken can never be given back.

i really do believe that the way in which you act towards life will come back to you — a cosmic karma, if you will. every living thing has the right to seek its own survival, sometimes at the expense of another living thing. so that doesn’t mean don’t eat meat, necessarily. it just means don’t kill wantonly, and perform the act as humanely as possible. i really do believe that the suffering and bad energy it creates — and the toxins the animal releases into its bloodstream under great duress — will come back to you, but if you treat life with respect, it contributes to a healthy state of mind and physical state of being.

james & miwa outside the seoul hilton hotel

well, another christmas away from home. it was pretty relaxed. spent christmas eve at the commander’s place, and then went to seoul to see miwa on christmas day. she made a nice christmas dinner for me and her friend doo hee.

courtesy of doo hee’s phone: