Month: November 2013

Mariah Blake chronicles the collapse of the Unification Church:

[I]n recent years, [Rev. Sun Myung] Moon’s plans to remake America and salvage humanity had run into trouble. Followers had drifted away; his political influence had ebbed. With his ninetieth birthday approaching, he increasingly looked to his children to preserve his life’s work.

In Jin, Moon and his wife’s fourth child, seemed suited for the task. She had a modern American upbringing and a master’s degree from Harvard. In 2009, she took over the Unification Church of America and introduced a bold modernization program. Her aim, she said, was to transform the church into one that people – especially young people – were “dying to join.” She renamed the church Lovin’ Life Ministries, shelved the old hymn books, and launched a rock band, an offshoot of which played New York clubs under the moniker Sonic Cult. She also discarded the old Korean-inspired traditions: bows and chanting gave way to “Guitar Hero” parties, open mics, concerts, and ping-pong tournaments.

And then, early last year, she disappeared:

After several months passed with no sign of her, some parishioners began pressing for information on her whereabouts. They were blocked at every turn. Even the highest circles of church leadership couldn’t – or wouldn’t – say what had happened to In Jin Moon. Before long, it became clear that the House of Moon was crumbling and In Jin had become caught up in its downfall. But her disappearance was only one part of a much more complicated saga – one that involved illegitimate children, secret sex rituals, foreign spy agencies, and the family of Vice President Joseph Biden. Even by Moon’s famously eccentric standards, the collapse of his American project would turn out to be spectacular and deeply strange.

Previous Dish on the Moonies here and here.

(Video: From the Washington Times’ 15th anniversary dinner, in 1997)

Justin Gregg considers whether there’s reason to believe in a special dolphin-human bond. On the plus side:

The phenomenon of lone sociable dolphins — for whom human contact appears to substitute for the company of their own kind — is documented extensively in the scientific literature. Among the better-known examples are Pita from Belize, Davina from England, Filippo from Italy, Tião from Brazil, and JoJo from Turks and Caicos. One report from 2003 described 29 lone sociable dolphins that were regularly observed by scientists, and a number of scientific articles have been published since then on new ones. There is no doubt that these animals are exhibiting inquisitive behaviour, which lends weight to the idea that dolphins do in fact seek out human contact with some regularity.

On the other hand:

The marine mammal researcher Toni Frohoff, director of TerraMar Research in California, reported an incident in which dolphins suddenly fled the scene as soon as a shark was spotted, leaving her to fend for herself. There’s even a news report from 2007 of an intoxicated man who was attacked by a group of bottlenose dolphins after falling into the Black Sea in Ukraine. The animals allegedly tried to drown him, prompting the Russian news agency Interfax to declare that they ‘lack the reputation of friendliness and love of humans enjoyed by dolphins in wealthy nations’. Perhaps the homicidal-dolphin phenomenon is more prevalent than we know. As Kathleen Dudzinski, my research supervisor at the Dolphin Communication Project, used to say: ‘You never hear from the people that the dolphins didn’t save.’

Previous Dish on dolphins here, here, here, and here.

Tim Murphy examines the growing market for political intelligence:

As Wall Street has pursued ever more complex ways to make a buck, the political intelligence industry has boomed, bringing in $402 million in 2009, according to Integrity Research Associates, which tracks the PI sector. That’s still small potatoes compared to the $3.3 billion lobbying industry, but it has caught the eye of critics who worry that it amounts to selling special access to the public’s business.

The political intelligence industry began to take shape in the early 1980s.

As federal regulatory power expanded, big business wanted to know what happened in obscure subcommittee hearings—and didn’t want to wait for the next day’s papers to read about it. In 1984, investment banker Ivan Boesky hired lobbyists to attend committee hearings about a big oil merger and report back to him. It paid off: Boesky made a cool $65 million just by finding out first and buying low. “Investors started to realize that there was money to be made by knowing what was going on in Washington and knowing it as quickly as possible,” says Michael Mayhew, the founder of Integrity Research Associates.

As Wall Street put an ever-greater premium on speed, investing in supercomputers to place orders milliseconds before the competition, the industry took off. The biggest known score came in 2005, when Congress was weighing approval of a $140 billion trust fund for asbestos liability claims. … A few days before then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) announced a vote on the plan, hedge funds snapped up stock in companies that would be shielded from lawsuits if the fund were set up. The Securities and Exchange Commission suspected that advance notice of the vote had leaked from the senator’s office to lobbyists who then tipped off their political-intelligence clients. That the asbestos fund ultimately never came to be was beside the point; the hedge funds had already made their money.

 
Shaunacy Ferro points to a new study that shows that since 1999, “the rise in drug deaths hasn’t been evenly spread out across the country, but has gone up most dramatically in rural areas”:

In 1999, only 3 percent of U.S. counties had an annual drug death rate of more than ten people per 100,000. By 2008, 54 percent of counties did. However, the increase has been most dramatic for rural populations, which according to the CDC have some of the highest rates of prescription drug abuse and overdose. Rural counties saw higher increases in age-adjusted death rates between 1999 and 2009. As you can see, the maps show about the same death rates for rural and urban populations in 2008-2009, but most rural areas started out with significantly lower drug deaths than urban areas back in 1999.

Jason Koebler looks at the data and sees more than just a “rural” problem:

The CDC and law enforcement groups say that much of that increase has been driven by the availability of prescription opioids such oxycodone and anti-anxiety drugs. The abuse of prescription painkillers are often seen as a “rural” problem, but data broken up by county suggests that cities have almost as much to worry about.

Between 1999 and 2009, drug poisoning deaths grew by 394 percent in rural areas and 279 percent for large metropolitan areas, according to the CDC’s county-level look at the data. The highest death rates from overdoses occurred in heavily populated areas, according to the study, published Tuesday in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine.