What's Happening in South Korea?

Plus: Massive COVID report finally released, Social Security's union, and more...

Martial law: South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law on Tuesday, claiming it was necessary to protect the homeland from "anti-state forces" including North Korean sympathizers. After a night of protests, the decree was rescinded merely six hours after it had gone into effect. Now, the country's opposition parties are attempting to impeach the president (which requires a two-thirds majority, something they can have if several members of Yoon's own party break from supporting him), with several prominent leaders accusing him of treason.

When the order was first announced, Yoon appointed Gen. Park An-su martial law commander. The officials banned "all political activities," spreading "fake news," and said that doctors (who had up until then been on strike due to the government's plan to increase the number of students allowed to enter medical schools) would be forced to return to work within 48 hours. "All news media and publications are under the control of martial law command," Park said.

It is not altogether shocking that Yoon did this. He won a close election in 2022, and has been seen as a marked departure from his progressive predecessor. Following his ascension, Yoon "turn[ed] to lawsuits, state regulators and criminal investigations to clamp down on speech that he called disinformation, efforts that were largely aimed at news organizations," reports The New York Times. "Police and prosecutors repeatedly raided the homes and newsrooms of journalists whom his office has accused of spreading 'fake news.'"

Following the martial law order, "Jo Seung-lae, a Democratic lawmaker, claimed that security camera footage…showed that troops moved in a way that suggested they were trying to arrest [political opponents] and even Han Dong-hoon, the leader of Yoon's People Power Party," reports the Associated Press.

Researcher Natalia Slavney of Korean affairs website 38 North told the Associated Press that this whole saga represents "a serious backslide of democracy" on the heels of a "worrying trend of abuse" since Yoon came into power.

COVID report released: The House's Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released its report on Monday, with findings that won't shock anyone who has been following this but do lend credence to the idea that vast numbers of government officials lied to us, sacrificing our health and wellbeing for…what, exactly? Control? Saving face?

"The Chinese government, agencies within the U.S. Government, and some members of the international scientific community sought to cover-up facts concerning the origins of the pandemic," reads the report. "Pandemic-era school closures will have enduring impact on generations of America's children and these closures were enabled by groups meant to serve those children." Relief funds were lost to fraud to the tune of $200 billion.

COVID-19, the report concludes, most likely stemmed from a lab leak in Wuhan, China—a lab that had received U.S. taxpayer funding in the form of gain-of-function research dollars, channeled through something called the EcoHealth Alliance, an organization that subawarded National Institutes of Health grants (and received insufficient oversight from the NIH). Lockdowns did "more harm than good" especially to child development, and six-foot social distancing was not "supported by science."

As for the future, the report makes good, decisive recommendations about how pandemics ought to be dealt with: "The Constitution cannot be suspended in times of crisis and restrictions on freedoms sow distrust in public health," for example, and "the prescription cannot be worse than the disease, such as strict and overly broad lockdowns that led to predictable anguish and avoidable consequences." Also, EcoHealth Alliance should never again receive taxpayer dollars and former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo "participated in medical malpractice" when he "publicly covered up the total number of nursing home fatalities in New York." (A beat I covered extensively at the time.)

But not all members of the subcommittee agreed with these conclusions: "Instead of coming together with Democrats to get ahead of future viruses or fortify America's public health infrastructure and workforce, Select Subcommittee Republicans prioritized extreme probes that vilified our nation's scientists and public health officials in an effort to whitewash former President Trump's disastrous COVID-19 response," said House Democrats from the subcommittee in their own report, a response to the main one.

Perhaps this is our horrible, fragmented future: dueling reports from two political parties, offering different explanations for who is responsible for a dark time in our nation's history, unable to agree on who is to blame. Get me off the ride.

The House released their 500+ page report on the COVID-19 pandemic.

key findings:

1. COVID-19 likely originated from a lab-related incident in Wuhan, linked to gain-of-function research funded with U.S. taxpayer dollars.

2. Over $200B in relief funds lost to fraud, with… pic.twitter.com/seQn3VglOh

— Will Manidis (@WillManidis) December 2, 2024

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Scenes from New York: At some New York City private high schools, a household income of $400,000 or $600,000 or $800,000 may qualify you for financial aid, finds a New York Times piece. "The average household income of families who applied for tuition assistance at [Upper East Side girls' school] Chapin, where tuition is $65,300, was $229,400," which the associate head of school says "reflects the fact that New York is one of the most expensive cities in the country." Maybe so, but this just looks like a situation where private schools have ratcheted their tuitions up so high that they're convincing the ultrarich to surreptitiously subsidize the pretty rich and very rich. It will be interesting to see if such a model is sustainable, or whether people retvrn to, like, homeschooling and governesses.

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• "The American Federation of Government Employees, a union representing 42,000 Social Security Administration workers, reached an agreement with the agency last week that will protect telework until 2029 in an updated contract," reports Bloomberg. The urgency here might be due to fears that President-elect Donald Trump forces government workers to return to office (oh, the horror of being expected to come to work!).
• "A certain rot creeps in to those who do not take responsibility for their actions, rot that the parent needs to keep scraping away, like moldy frosting from a cake, to get to the good of the child; to make the child appear worthy to the world," writes journalist/buddy o' mine Nancy Rommelmann at Make More Pie. "You better believe the child knows how to keep this going, knows how to alchemize parental desperation into the next infusion of cash, of support; to force the father to construct, as we see in [Joe] Biden's blanket pardoning his son, the simulacrum of an honorable and unjustly persecuted man worthy of having the slate wiped clean."
• Zepbound, a weight-loss drug, has outperformed Wegovy in head-to-head trials.
• Marine LePen, France's leader of its far-right political party, threw her support behind a vote of no confidence in Prime Minister Michel Barnier which was initially proposed by the left; apparently the bipartisan consensus is that Barnier, and President Emmanuel Macron who appointed him, suck.* (The fact that LePen's folks might help the left pull this off, he says, "would be a vote of unbearable cynicism.")
• Very good take:

Totally understandable perspective.

It's imperative to keep government out of funding assisted dying. It should be a concierge service not covered by Medicare or mandated to be covered by private insurers.

Easy to become dystopian in either direction. Agency is paramount. https://t.co/IKYcpW4XJI

— Zach Weissmueller (@TheAbridgedZach) November 30, 2024

• Nice:

BREAKING: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy reportedly considering ending daylight savings time as a part of the Department of Government Efficiency, per Forbes.

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) December 3, 2024

*CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated the object of the no-confidence vote.