Caveat: The Wilderness Downtown

"The Wilderness Downtown" is an experimental music "video" written using HTML5 by googloids.  It's pretty cool – you need Chrome to view it.  You put in your home address, and it uses footage from Google Earth and Street View to incorporate your actual house into the video, dynamically.  I can't decide if this is creepy or awesome.  Call it crawesome.

I put in my childhood home, in Arcata, and saw the very recognizable dead-end street with Peggy and Latif's cars in the driveway (Peggy and Latif being the current residents of the house where I grew up).  And there were some animated trees marching up 11th street.  Very strange.

The music is by Arcade Fire.  Not too bad.  The technical implementation of the video – which calls up large numbers of windows in a rather random way – is deficient in that it fails to deal very well with the small, non-standard-size screen of my Asus netbook computer.  The windows all hide each other and you can't see more than half of the ones it calls up.  The code would have to somehow do better at reading the display size and used scaled-down, lower resolution windows depending on what it found, maybe.

Caveat: How to get out of South Korea

Actually, as is often the case, the caveat above is a bit misleading.  I've been thinking about Afghanistan, after reading some fragments of blog posts that included a discussion of the issues entitled:  "How to get out of Afghanistan."  And I immediately thought about South Korea. 

Now that our (by "our" I mean US) significant military presence in South Korea is in its 60th year, why does no one take seriously the idea that we need to "get out" of South Korea?  Because the mission is viewed as a "success" – we have a long-standing, almost unquestionable partnership with the South Koreans. 

So why is the only way to conceptualize "success" in Afghanistan couched in terms of "getting out"?  I think a real, genuine geopolitical success could just as easily be conceptualized as getting to the point where conditions "on the ground" for US troops in Afghanistan are just as boring and routine as the conditions for US troops in South Korea. 

I'm not saying that's the only option.  But I think people who insist that "leaving Afghanistan" is the only possible way to be successful are deeply misunderstanding what the role of "enlightened military superpower" is supposed to be.  Not that I agree with the idea that the US must necessarily be an enlightened military superpower – but you can't have it both ways:  choosing to operate on those terms in a place like South Korea, because it's convenient and relatively painless, and then failing to operate on those same terms in a place like Afghanistan, because it's painful and inconvenient.

It seems consistency is important not just in parenting and teaching children, but in geopolitics, too.

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