Can We Ever Just Mind Our Own Business?

Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission.

Attacks on Iran are already being explored by the incoming Trump administration, which put me to mind of this article I wrote in 2016. Collectively, the U.S. government and its apparatus is the world’s biggest and noisiest busybody. We just can’t leave well enough alone. It’s time for a new approach: not isolationism, because that’ll never happen, but an MYOB approach, as in minding your own business. (Quick Note: the $700 billion for national “defense” mentioned below in 2016 is now $900 billion for 2024-25. And the U.S. has even more military bases overseas: 750-800 of them. Looks like MYOB is even more of a long shot as we approach 2025.)

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The Failure of Yoon’s Desperate Power Grab

More than a week after Yoon’s attempted coup, the South Korean president is digging in his heels and refusing to quit. Yoon is now under investigation for insurrection, and he is under a travel ban so that he cannot leave the country. The disgraced president delivered another speech in which he repeated many of the same deranged claims he made when he declared martial law. He has vowed to “fight to the end.” Yoon’s party shielded him from impeachment last week, but that support has crumbled as more details about the coup have come to light and Yoon refuses to resign:

South Korea’s ruling party has thrown its support behind attempts to impeach embattled President Yoon Suk Yeol over his ill-fated decision to declare martial law that sparked a political crisis and widespread public anger in the country.

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Study Finds 96% of Gaza Children Fear Imminent Death – And Half Want to Die

Amid a relentless Israeli onslaught that has wrought monumental physical and psychological destruction in Gaza, a report published this week revealed that nearly all children in the embattled Palestinian enclave believe their death is imminent – and nearly half of them want to die.

The Gaza-based Community Training Center for Crisis Management, supported by War Child Alliance, surveyed more than 500 Palestinian children in Gaza last June and found that 96% of them fear imminent death, 92% are not accepting of reality, 79% suffer from nightmares, 77% avoid discussing traumatic events, 73% display signs of aggression, 49% wish to die because of the war, and many more “show signs of withdrawal and severe anxiety, alongside a pervasive sense of hopelessness.”

“This report lays bare that Gaza is one of the most horrifying places in the world to be a child,” War Child U.K. CEO Helen Pattinson said in a statement. “Alongside the leveling of hospitals, schools, and homes, a trail of psychological destruction has caused wounds unseen but no less destructive on children who hold no responsibility for this war.”

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Al-Qaeda Rides Again… in Syria

As Christians around the world prepare to celebrate Christmas, a hell has been unleashed inside Syria with the seizure of the country by the re-named “al-Qaeda in Syria” now called Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Its leader is a former deputy commander of ISIS, Abu Mohammed al-Julani.

While neocons and the mainstream media in the US and Europe celebrate the overthrow of the Assad government – a priority since the Obama Administration – as with previous US “liberations” in Libya and Iraq the outcome is proving to be anything but liberating. Christian churches are being ransacked and believers abused.

Sharia law has been announced by the new justice minister, Shadi Alwaisi.

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