Reading/Activity List
I know, I haven't posted in months and now I'm even abandoning format. However, I just wanted to share some of the things that have made this fine Memorial Day (my last one in Washington, DC for the foreseeable future) such a nice one:

• Jazz on the Mall, aka Emily M's entire reason for living in DC and having all of our email addresses, returned on Friday. Neither it nor the sangria disappointed.
  
  
• How have I not heard of Austin's annual Pun contest before?!? The Economist illuminates: The first part of the event, which is scripted, is for Punniest of Show. One man offered a topical routine: “Oil be damned.” The year’s winners, Kelly Dupen and Justin Golbabai, did a skit about meat and vegetables. “We both came into this relationship with a lot of personal cabbage,” said Ms Dupen. The second was an unprepared battle between punslingers.
  
  
• Great, although light-touch, story in Wired about the Pixar process - a worthwhile read on a *successful* creative culture. Wired also had a good interview with two authors on intrinsic motivation and creative drivers: Clay Shirky and Daniel Pink.
  
  
• Saw a rocking show by Fitz & The Tantrums Saturday @ the BlackCat - good recorded and great live. (Less relevant topics: Eurovision and American Pop v local culture).
  
  
• All hail Earth's new masters! That said most technology is awesome (although some is also strange).
  
  
• Pew released it's most recent What has America Talking. SPOILER: Not Iraq or Afghanistan. Good follow up on bloggers v mainstream interests.
  
  
• Procrastination: Superhero Term Papers.
  
  
• The new National Security Strategy was released on Friday. Leslie Gelb (who has advocated replacing the entire foreign policy team with himself and former friends/colleagues of his), calls it "forgettable", although his home organization of CFR has a slightly more sober roundtable. The Press is hopelessly stuck on the "not Bush" "new diplomacy" reading. Abu Muqawama, as usual, comes through with the best commentary on what it's like to implement a strategy that has no priorities and makes no decisions about what we are NOT going to do.
  
  
• The release of the new NSS has returned attention to one very good but doomed idea: a unified national-security budget: Although Clinton's open support of a unified national-security budget is new, the idea is not. Leading experts have been pushing the concept for a while. The Project on National Security Reform, led by James R. Locher III, proposed just that. In a sad tale, this very proposal led to the defunding of the entire organization, because the late Rep. John Murtha stripped the group of all its money out of fear his jurisdiction over the defense budget could be affected.
  
  
• About to give up command at Joint Forces Command, GEN Mattis reflects:
  
  Q. What are the real lessons of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars?
  A.War is a human endeavor, a social problem, and we have modest expectations that technology is going to solve a problem as complex as warfare.
  
  Second, no war is over until the enemy says it's over. We may think it over, we may declare it over, but in fact, the enemy gets a vote, as we're often saying in the military. A third point is that what we cannot do is look towards war today as something that we are going to fight on our own. We are going to be fighting alongside allies of some stripe, and we are going to have to create a military that can easily adapt to other allies fighting alongside it as part of our formations, and perhaps us fighting as part of their formations.
  
  But you can't simply transport the lessons from one theater, even one as recent as Iraq, directly to Afghanistan. It's its own country, the enemy is its own enemy, the terrain is different. Most importantly, the human terrain - the complexity of the human connections, the tribal relationships - is different.
  
  
• 'Meanwhile, things are going poorly in Kandahar, although the skills we are leaning are actually being, well, learned: The idea is to take the kinds of COIN training and "proficiency" standards that McChrystal, the top American general in Afghanistan, implemented there with his "AfPak Hands" program... a language and cultural immersion effort under which U.S. forces gain skills to help them carry out counterinsurgency missions. Military officials have made gaining the trust and support of local populations in Afghanistan a cornerstone of the ongoing allied mission there - AfPak Hands is aimed at bolstering that effort.
  
  
• Not much to say about DeepWater Horizon, although the NYT has a great map worth checking out and the Foreign Policy folks have apparently set their interns out on awful metaphor patrol for the summer.
  
  
• The Economist said it best: Israeli commandos, who made their name at Entebbe, now in their shoddiest hour. While we don't yet know all the facts, the apparent killing of at least 10 people aboard a ship bound for Gaza with humanitarian aid already has all the hallmarks of a massive public-relations disaster. Drezner links to all the other sites I was going to link to (and with better commentary). While the passengers where clearly less than non-violent and the footage of their attacking Israeli commandos (released by Israel) is circulating YouTube, I think this is a pretty clear example of Israel's continued strategic thinking and inability to think beyond the operational level. This ship has done more to hurt Israel that any other opponent has in a long time.