America's bad bet on expanding legal sports gambling

The United States is in the midst of a sports gambling boom, and it may be a generational policy mistake.

Anyone who has watched the Super Bowl, listened to a sports podcast, walked into an arena that has a gambling parlor, or, in my case, opened my mailbox to see direct mail from DraftKings offering “free bets” has seen the explosion in sports betting throughout the US.

-snip-

The result has been an explosion in gambling. And based on the research we have, the harm such widespread adoption has caused is not trivial. With the United States’s boom so recent and therefore data somewhat sparse, the United Kingdom is a useful comparison. It has had a legalized and regulated system for over 15 years, one that includes not just sports but casino gambling.

An extensive report by Bloomberg cataloged the harms since legalization: Sixty percent of industry profits come from the top 5 percent of users; the industry, supposedly regulated, has an estimated 36,000 children addicted to it; the government estimates 8 percent of suicides are gambling related.

In 2016, the situation was already so bad that the co-founder of Paddy Power, an industry leader, resigned from the company’s board while “fighting back tears” because he believed he was complicit in an immoral industry, Bloomberg reported.

Since then, the situation has only gotten worse, and amid a surge of suicides linked to gamblers deep in debt, the UK government has promised a policy plan on the gambling industry paired with reforms and new regulations.

https://www.vox.com/23641580/draftkings-fanduel-sports-betting-gambling-problems-march-madness

The Pareto principle predicts this outcome, they knew most of the profits were going to come from problem users, that's how it works.

German tourists visiting Israel attacked by Palestinians in Nablus

German tourists visiting Israel were lightly injured on Saturday when they were attacked by Nablus residents for entering the Palestinian city with an Israeli vehicle registration plate.

Photos and videos taken at the scene show the tourists were driving in a Tel Aviv share car that featured an Israeli flag on its rear end.

The two tourists managed to escape the crowd and were eventually escorted back to Israel by security forces, where they will be given medical treatment for their injuries.

German Ambassador to Israel Steffan Seibert condemned the attack on the two German tourists, stating that "a mob attacking tourists because they don‘t like their license plate is disgusting and cowardly."

https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-734715

Short video:
https://twitter.com/AboAlezswafery/status/1637091380991238144
https://twitter.com/JoeTruzman/status/1637296401284734977

Tweet from Gisele Fetterman

A World Without Men

Youngmi’s childhood was a difficult one. The 25-year-old nurse was born to a poor family in Daegu, South Korea, known for being one of the most conservative cities in the country. Youngmi’s mom left the home when Youngmi was young to escape her husband’s physical abuse, leaving her and her sister behind with him and their paternal grandmother. When she was 5, her 8-year-old sister started losing her hair from stress.

As she grew older, Youngmi found herself depressed, unsure of what her future held, and financially unstable. In Korea’s patriarchal society — in which women are generally expected to defer to their fathers and to adhere to rigid beauty standards — she felt like a perpetual victim, obsessed by the wrongs done to her by her father and pressured into maintaining her appearance in order to please men. Despite her meager budget as a nursing student, she purchased new clothes each season, spending a lot of money on cheap, poor-quality clothes from H&M. She wore makeup religiously. “I could not go outside without any makeup. I felt ashamed of my face,” she said. “I had this pressure of wanting to look beautiful and wanting to be desirable, physically or sexually.”

While scrolling through Twitter in 2018, Youngmi came across footage of protests taking place in the streets of Seoul. In South Korea, where cases of femicide, revenge porn, and dating violence are widespread, a surge in spy-cam sex crimes, overwhelmingly committed by men, had mostly resulted in fines and suspended jail sentences, if they were prosecuted at all. That was not the case, however, for one 25-year-old woman who had taken a nonconsensual photo of a nude male model at art school and posted it online; she was sentenced to ten months in prison and court-ordered sexual-violence counseling. The demonstrations were a reaction to the blatant hypocrisy.

https://www.thecut.com/2023/03/4b-movement-feminism-south-korea.html

It's notable that the authors don't buy the apartheid smear.

Proof that it's just an antisemitic lie.

US state department.

Currently, officials are telling U.S. citizens:

Do Not Travel to:

Colima state due to crime and kidnapping.
Guerrero state due to crime.
Michoacan state due to crime and kidnapping.
Sinaloa state due to crime and kidnapping
Tamaulipas state due to crime and kidnapping.
Zacatecas state due to crime and kidnapping.

Reconsider Travel To:

Baja California state due to crime and kidnapping.
Chihuahua state due to crime and kidnapping.
Durango state due to crime.
Guanajuato state due to crime and kidnapping.
Jalisco state due to crime and kidnapping.
Morelos state due to crime.
Sonora state due to crime and kidnapping.

Exercise Increased Caution When Traveling To:

Aguascalientes state due to crime.
Baja California Sur state due to crime.
Chiapas state due to crime.
Coahuila state due to crime.
Hidalgo state due to crime.
Mexico City due to crime.
Mexico State due to crime.
Nayarit state due to crime.
Nuevo Leon state due to crime and kidnapping.
Oaxaca state due to crime.
Puebla state due to crime and kidnapping.
Queretaro state due to crime.
Quintana Roo state due to crime and kidnapping.
San Luis Potosi state due to crime and kidnapping.
Tabasco state due to crime.
Tlaxcala state due to crime.
Veracruz state due to crime.

Exercise Normal Precautions When Traveling To:

Campeche state
Yucatan state

https://www.abc15.com/news/national/officials-urging-u-s-citizens-to-avoid-travel-to-areas-of-mexico-due-to-crime-kidnappings

Mexico's young democracy teeters on the edge of a cliff

Twice in recent months, first on Nov. 13 and then Feb. 26, tens of thousands of Mexicans took to the streets to protest a new law that will gut the nation’s autonomous electoral authority. Their cries of distress should be heard widely — and heeded. The electoral law, championed by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and signed by him in recent days, is a knife stabbing at the heart of Mexico’s democracy.

“Don’t touch our vote!” the demonstrators chanted in Mexico City’s Zócalo, the vast square in front of the presidential palace, many wearing shirts and baseball caps in pink, the color of the National Electoral Institute, or INE, that would be sundered by the new law. “We’re not ready to lose our democracy,” Óscar Casanova, a businessman, told The Post’s Mary Beth Sheridan.

For seven decades, Mexico was ruled by a single party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which lost the presidential contest in 2000, opening the way to a period of multiparty competition. The National Electoral Institute has played a key role in this transition as an independent, nonpartisan authority, deploying thousands of workers who issue voter IDs and control virtually all aspects of state and federal balloting. The new law would emasculate the INE, requiring it to close 40 offices around the country and sharply reduce its staff and resources. It would also weaken the agency’s enforcement mechanisms, limiting its ability to sanction candidates for severe offenses.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/07/mexico-democracy-protestst-lopez-obrador-amlo/

Iran may be behind BDS 'hit list' targeting Boston Jews - report

The Islamic Republic of Iran may be the regime that created an anonymous "Mapping Project" website that serves to pinpoint locations of Jewish or Zionist communal spaces and organizations as well as law enforcement agencies in Massachusetts in an "attempt to expose and isolate" supporters of Israel.

The Mapping Project also includes "a disturbing and antisemitic call to 'dismantle' and 'disrupt' most of Boston's Jewish community and concludes with a thinly veiled threat that 'every entity has an address, every network can be disrupted," the ADL has stated.

According to a Zachor statement, “more than two-thirds of the 505 ‘targets’ featured on the website are not Jewish institutions, but rather US security institutions, including the exact locations of 271 police stations, 9 US military bases and installations, and offices of Homeland Security, the FBI, the Secret Service, and US government-linked weapons manufacturers, all of which are pinpointed on a single interactive map.”

The legal organization noted that the “outsized focus placed on the American security apparatus indicates that the map is not domestic in origin, but might be a product of a foreign agenda and that the chief suspect is the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

https://m.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-733382

He hasn't really talked about depression.

He checked himself into a hospital, which is unusual, and is being treated by medical doctors for "clinical" depression.

He might not realize this, but not everyone sees depression as a medical issue solved with psychotropic drugs.

The neurotransmitter imbalance "theory" of depression never had any true support in the literature, and is now in the process of being abandoned for lack of evidence. Most people will never know this of course, and will continue to take mind altering drugs for depression and other mental illnesses.

EG:

They can't, he's a dictator.

Since 2013, Freedom House ranks Turkey as "Not Free".

https://freedomhouse.org/country/turkey/freedom-world/2022

The US, EU and NATO Should be isolating him politically, and promoting breaking up Turkey to create a Kurdish state. Can't even imagine why Blinken would meet with him.