"…And a War in the Middle East"

@kianiprestige/Twitter

The United States has been in international news lately. Last week much of the world's media focused on the grand jury announcement in Ferguson, Missouri. Foreign reporters already in U.S. police news mode then picked up the grand jury announcement over the death of Eric Garner in New York City.

None of this, of course, is new. Cops in the U.S. have been killing hundreds of Americans of every race each year, in incidents ranging from good shots to murder. In just the month before the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson captured the mainstream media's attention, cops in Ohio shot a man holding a fake gun in the fake gun aisle of Walmart and a cop in Georgia shot a 17-year-old in the chest after he opened the door for her holding a Wii controller, which is white.

While the attention to Ferguson helped the Eric Garner grand jury receive a level of media attention the second Ramarley Graham grand jury never did, it's still no guarantee of wider attention to incidents of police killings. The killing of Rumain Brisbon earlier this week over a bottle of prescription pills has yet to enter the national or international news cycle and is unlikely to.

But the U.S. is in international news for another reason, too, if not in domestic news, for the continuing campaign against ISIS. The U.S. conducted at least 25 more air strikes in Syria in the last week, strikes Syria's Bashar Assad has dismissed as unserious. King Abdullah of Jordan, one of the members of the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS called the struggle "our third world war." France is now conducting what's described as "major" raids in Iraq.

Amid all this, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has also been a leading national voice on police issues, is forcing a vote on the war (in all but name) with ISIS, by threatening to attach a declaration of war to a world drinking water bill being considered in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, drawing the ire of Sen. John "not an angry bird" McCain (R-Az.), who said it was an example of why Congress shouldn't bother with lame duck sessions. Congress, of course, has failed to act as a check on the president's war-making powers both in the regular and lame duck sessions of Congress held during Barack Obama's presidency. He's the fourth consecutive president to commit U.S. military force to Iraq, and the first not to bother getting any kind of OK from Congress at all. And so war in the Middle East just doesn't cut it as news anymore.

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Comments

[anon]

Procedures will be updated. Policies will be changed.

[Hugh Akston]

Being in the Senate with John McCain must be like Thanksgiving dinner with your cantankerous, racist grandpa all year long.

[Shirley Knott]

Anything that pisses off that cowardly traitor McCain is automatically considered a good thing by default.

[nuffcedmcgreevey]

The real question is why actually declaring war against ISIS, per the Constitution, would be a problem for McWarmonger.

[Hyperion]

OT:

Odds that this thing ever leaves earth orbit?

Orion almost goes into space

[LynchPin1477]

Linked to this in the AM, but I can’t get enough of it.

[John Titor]

That pretty accurately describes my design process in Kerbal Space Program. Except there’s no asparagus staging.

[Heroic Mulatto]

My current design process in KSP is nil, as I haven’t been playing since ferram and company had their hissy fit over Win x64.

I had just got my first probe on Eve too.

[John Titor]

I haven’t been back to it in a couple months, basically since I landed a 3-man capsule on Duna. The only mod I ever used was Protractor because I’m too lazy to do the long-hand math. I had plans to design a space-taxi thing to ferry parts for a Duna space station but I don’t have enough free time to waste.

[Heroic Mulatto]

I’m doing a quasi-historical NASA/Soviet mashup in my sandbox game. I’m currently in the 70s-ish era. My “Eveneras” are heading toward Eve at the same time my Viking analogs are heading toward Duna. I use NEAR as a mod because the aerodynamics are much better and you actually have a reason to use fairings. Life support mods are also fun as I have a Salyut/Skylab up there as well.

[John Titor]

Yeah the aerodynamics model in the base game is really meh, I didn’t mess around with planes all that much though. I’m more waiting for the developers to finally add fatal G-forces. Is there any mod that makes Lagrangian points possible? I heard the game’s physics engine can’t handle it for some reason.

[Lyle]

Rand Paul also doesn’t realize that Iran is an enemy. He’s as gullible as Obama.

[Hugh Akston]

What makes Iran an enemy? The fact that they didn’t return the spy drone that the US crashed in their territory?

[jmomls]

*What makes Iran an enemy?*

You must be too young to remember them taking our embassy by force and imprisoning our citizens therein, which used to be casus belli when the world was run by sane people.

You must also be too young to remember Iranian operatives helping to kill our forces in Iraq.

Ergo, you must be too young to be posting here with grown-ups.

[Hugh Akston]

Well the hostage crisis certainly happened before I was born, but it seems to me like a government concerned for the welfare of their employees wouldn’t try to operate an embassy in a country undergoing a violent revolution.

As for Iraq, I’m certainly too young to remember what American troops were doing there in the first place.

[Cytotoxic]

The hundreds of Americans murdered by Iranian-sponsored terrorism including the 1998 embassy bombings where Iran colluded with Al-Quaeda.

[Paul.]

in the chest after he opened the door for her holding a Wii controller, which is white.

Wii controllers can be black. Just saying. So if it was a black controller, then I’m sure she deserved getting shot in the face.

The killing of Rumain Brisbon earlier this week over a bottle of prescription pills has yet to enter the national or international news cycle and is unlikely to.

This shooting more resembled the Michael Brown killing than it did, say, the Eric Garner killing.

Which of course, is surprising why it didn’t get more media attention.

France is now conducting what’s described as “major” raids in Iraq.

*Drums fingers on table… judges quietly*

And so war in the Middle East just doesn’t cut it as news anymore.

It’s because the media’s collective voice is hoarse from yelling, “Booooooosh!” in that Invasion-of-the-body-snatchers way.

[Tamfang]

When I saw the headline, I thought it was a retread of the old joke: “They told me if I voted for Goldwater for president we’d get [three bad results], and they were right.”