the life of james

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

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.

has it only been a year-and-a-half? a year-and-a-half has been simultaneously three weeks and three years, and eight months has been like a lifetime… i’ve lived and died so many times, i don’t even know which life i’m on anymore.

i still have the dreams — both the beautiful ones and the nightmares. sometimes i still curl up and shake uncontrollably. my brain chemistry all fucked up, my emotions all out of whack. i think i have ptsd.

some wars you fight on the soil of a faraway land, and some wars you fight in the privacy of your own mind. and those wars — the ones waged in silence — are the worst, because no one can even help you because no one knows, and even if they did, they wouldn’t know how. the only thing tangible is the way you wither away from inside.

some sights, some sounds, some smells and touches, some memories you can never forget.

religious leaders appealing to religious teachings to encourage a religious constituency to do the right thing isn’t blasphemous; it’s a textbook example of knowing your audience. that it has to do with politics is no more a violation of the separation between church and state or an assault on the christian faith than what jesus himself said in the bible: “give to caesar what is caesar’s and to god what is god’s.” in fact, it’s practically the same message.

what irks me is that the mere mention of jesus’ name instantly supercharges any conversation. it shouldn’t be that way. credit that to people who throw out jesus’ name for their own ends; it seems to me a true christian would never invoke jesus’ name for the sake of personal gain, only for the sake of god and god’s ends — which is to say in the promotion of love and righteousness. encouraging people to obey laws hardly seems to go against what jesus himself said.

Group’s Census promo called ‘blasphemous’

A Hispanic group promotes full participation in next year’s Census with an ad campaign built around the story of Christmas.

By Haya El Nasser, USA TODAY

A push to spread the gospel about the 2010 Census this Christmas is stoking controversy with a campaign that links the government count to events surrounding the birth of Jesus.

The National Association of Latino Elected Officials is leading the distribution to churches and clergy of thousands of posters that depict the arrival of Joseph and a pregnant Mary in Bethlehem more than 2,000 years ago. As chronicled in the Gospel of Luke, Joseph returned to be counted in a Roman census, but he and Mary found no room at an inn, and Jesus was born in a manger.

“This is how Jesus was born,” the poster states. “Joseph and Mary participated in the Census.”

Most of the posters are in Spanish and target Latino evangelicals, says Jose Cruz, senior director of civic engagement at the Latino association, which launched its Ya Es Hora (It’s Time) campaign in 2006 to promote voter registration among Latinos.

It is promoting the Census, used to help allocate $400 billion a year in federal dollars, redraw state and local political districts and determine the number of seats each state gets in Congress.

“Our challenge is a full Latino count,” says Cruz, who designed the poster. For people who fear government — especially those here illegally — the plea to fill out the Census has to come from someone they trust, he says. “There is no more trusted voice in our community than faith-based leaders.”

The campaign may counter efforts by one Latino evangelical group to get Hispanics to boycott the Census unless Congress changes immigration laws.

The Rev. Miguel Rivera, chairman of the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders, says invoking the name of Jesus to promote the 2010 Census is “blasphemous” and “violates the concept of separation of church and state.” Using the name of Jesus for “a political and secular intention, it is definitely an assault against our Christian faith,” Rivera says.

Government did not pay or play a role in creating the posters, says Nick Kimball, spokesman at the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau. “We work with people from all walks of life to get an accurate count but do not provide funding,” he says. Most mainstream Latino groups do not support a Census boycott.

Tying the Census to the Christmas story strengthens the message, Cruz says, because “Mary and Joseph, who were both God-fearing, decided they needed to participate.”

“결혼해 주세요.”
“네.”
“cool.”

well, the topic of marriage seems to be rearing its head everywhere these days… jenny and will are getting married; now that jeff is getting deployed to afghanistan, he and his girlfriend in taiwan are rushing to get married before he leaves; v says he’s ready to settle down with his girl…

and then there is james. marriage… is a big and scary subject, for many reasons. the biggest reason is that if i make a promise, i make that promise forever. for me, forever means forever — not ’til i find someone younger and prettier than you, not ’til i get sick and tired of your annoying quirks and you start to drive me crazy, but forever.

it’s unfortunate that the divorce rate is over fifty percent these days, and in the military, with the strain of multiple deployments, it’s around sixty. it’s also unfortunate that some people at least partially blame this on homosexual partnerships, which “destroy the sanctity of marriage.” the problem with marriage these days isn’t that homosexuals are corrupting its sanctity; the problem is that heterosexual men and women rush into things and make promises they either don’t truly understand or they don’t truly mean. ie, they get married with the mindset that they truly love the other person, when they really don’t and only think they do, or they get married with the mindset that if it doesn’t work out, they can always get a divorce anyways. people set themselves up for failure.

anyone who has ever been around a successful marriage knows that for the union to remain strong and intact, it takes work! it requires total commitment to the other person, the intestinal fortitude to swallow one’s pride and make the difficult sacrifice, and the integrity to truly live up to one’s word when things get tough and there is nothing you would like to do more than run away and leave the mess behind. but instead, people lack the balls to own up to their promises and bail on the relationship, because that’s the easier thing to do. it’s easier to blame the other person, or to cut and run. it’s difficult to forgive.

now granted, there are situations where one partner does irreparable harm to the marriage, and there is no point in continuing on together — such as cases of abuse and repeated infidelities. it takes two to tango after all, and you can’t make a person keep on dancing unless he or she chooses to. but by and large, the majority of failed marriages are the result of people making poor/hasty decisions for the wrong reasons, with unrealistic expectations for the relationship going forward or counting on changes in the other person they have no right to expect will come, and without truly willing to commit to their own promises of “in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, ’til death do us apart.”

and the other thing: you need to keep the romance, man! you need to keep fanning the flames! you need to stay young at heart, even while maturing together and gaining a deeper understanding of each other. you have to keep falling in love again. kisses, flowers, long walks on the beach, dinner dates on the town, crazy passionate sex, and the confidence that you are the best and no one else can rock his or her world like you can — the swagger if you will. and free time apart from each other to do your own things. all of it easier said than done, of course. no one truly knows how another person will change and grow over time, but if you don’t have a pretty damn good idea, then you have no business asking the question.

finally, if nothing else, don’t be tiger woods.

i would like to take the time to wish everyone a safe and relaxing thanksgiving weekend.

it’s going to be a lonely holiday again this year. the family is on the other side of the world, and the girlfriend is working, as the koreans already celebrated chusok.

just another day in the life.

to all my brethren deployed to iraq and afghanistan, you’re in our prayers. come home alive.

well, james’ foray into the world of financial markets has officially hit three months, so after a quarter of trading, it’s time to gauge the results. his goal: beat the market and make some dough.

and the diagnosis: james is not bad. i’ve managed to pretty much mirror the dow jones industrial average, and for awhile, i was keeping pace with the s&p 500. my stock picks actually outperformed the s&p 500 when including dividend returns, but due to one very important factor (commissions), real returns were slightly lower. but i will get into that in a moment.

james vs the dow

james vs the s&p 500

my current holdings, top ten are listed below:

on the whole, i picked large US-based companies, because as a beginner, they were the ones with which i was most familiar:

breakdown vs the s&p 500:

at first, i jumped in expecting to do a lot of buying and selling. but one significant factor soon changed my notion of how to act: commissions. because i am just starting out and have not yet built a large enough portfolio or made enough trades, i am looking at $12.99/trade on etrade, or as low as $3 trades on sogotrade. it does help that many sites like etrade offer a certain number of free trades for new accounts, but unfortunately, once the free trades run out, the commissions begin. in all, between july and september, i had about a 5% expense ratio, which was the difference between matching the s&p 500 and matching the dow.

as a result, i gravitated towards large companies that pay out dividends, which i would hold on to instead of frequent buying and selling. as such, i could expect my portfolio to generally mirror the economy. with the recovering economy, that means i would see a generally upward growth rate, plus on top of that, i’d receive returns from dividends. not exactly the sexiest strategy, but until i have enough money to drop a few grand on a single trade, it’s the most effective.

my single best move was picking up starbucks, which yielded a 45% return, expenses included. my worst move was investing in kroeger, which netted me a 6% loss after expenses.

all in all, i saw a 5% gain during the third quarter after expenses. without expenses, gains would have doubled.

of course, all of this reflects only the part of my portfolio i actively traded. when considering mutual funds, i’ve actually managed to post a 17% gain after expenses. this is because most of my money goes into either my roth ira or a nasdaq-100 index fund (combined they hold over 75% of my investments), which are both extremely aggressive and offer high yields but also high risk. the roth ira is a usaa 2050 lifecycle fund, and the nasdaq-100 index fund is also through usaa.

the advantage of the mutual funds, of course, is that i don’t have to spend time placing trades, and i don’t pay commissions for trades, so they are much more diverse than my portfolio would be otherwise.

now if only i could figure out puts and calls and what have you…

well, not much new to report, except for a fairly relaxing four day weekend in celebration of veteran’s day.

today i finally played the new ‘guitar hero.’ nicole bought it, and let me say it is definitely pretty fun. better than ‘rock band?’ i don’t know, i haven’t played either enough to pick up on the subtleties. my question is, can you use ‘rock band’ and ‘guitar hero’ guitars with the other game? i would hate to have to buy four separate guitars for my wii!

we also watched ‘the mist,’ which had come highly recommended from nicole’s ex. i had read the book probably about ten years ago. what a crappy movie! what a crappy ending too! i guess that’s what you call “ironic.” it’s also what i call a depressing ending to a depressingly bad movie, so i guess it’s rather fitting.

finally, i am supposed to get a phone tomorrow. i had been living without one for over a month, and i asked my parents to send me an old phone so i could have it reactivated. in all honesty, i would rather not have one. it wasn’t an accident that my phone broke, and frankly, for my own mental and emotional well-being, breaking my phone was one of the best things i did all summer. i say “summer,” because to me it still feels like summer. maybe it’s because i never had a summer. as soon as i graduated, it was off to work, then off to training. i never had a break where i could just relax. and all the while, i was dealing with so much trauma, and i felt dead inside.

the big news is that i finally got a kitten. unfortunately i was never able to bring bushy home, so yesterday i drove to the animal rescue league of el paso in canutillo, tx. my problem with rural texas is that the streets are either poorly marked or they aren’t marked at all! somehow i ended up in new mexico, so what was supposed to be about a thirty minute drive turned into about an hour!

when i finally got there, i instantly fell in love with the cutest little kitten ever. her name is leann. she looks kind of like bushy, but with smaller paws. anyhow, i adopted her on the spot, then drove to petsmart and picked up all my cat supplies.

leann is still pretty scared. she was hiding between the headboard of my bed and the wall all of yesterday, and when i woke up, it took me almost an hour to find her. i had to search through every little nook and cranny for her. finally, i looked under the heater, which runs along the wall of the bathroom, and i saw her underneath it in the corner behind the toilet.

she loves when i pet her, but she still refuses to come out. we’re making some progress, though. i’ve been able to lure her out a few inches more each time i pet her. i will definitely take some pictures once she is more comfortable. i also might rename her.

leann totally reminds me of myself! she is such a whore for being petted! every time i put my hand near her, she rubs against me, begging for me to stroke her. when i do pet her, her eyes half close and she doesn’t stop purring. i’m pretty much the same way; i love to be petted! she also reminds me of the way in which farizah would purr every time i touched her. it was so cute! i’d massage her or rub her, or just play with her hair, and she’d smile and stick out her little fang and say “purr!” she actually copied that from me; i did that one time but then she definitely took over that idiosyncracy!

oh well…

in other news, i finally beat ‘chocobo’s dungeon’ on wii! before that i was playing ‘the dog island.’ man, i’m sickening! i might get ‘okami’ next.

also, i did the unthinkable and created a profile on eharmony and match.com. that and i met a really cute girl danielle at a bar, and i’m going on a double date with her on wednesday. i know you’re probably getting sick of hearing about, but it’s still hard for me. i don’t want to move on…