You might have expected a Juneteenth post, but what can I say? Slavery was bad, glad it's abolished.
If you lived in the Boston area 15 years ago, and even if you didn't, you may remember the case of Philip Markoff, the so-called Craiglist killer. He was a Boston University medical student, with a wedding date set, who developed a hobby of making dates with sex workers at Boston area hotels and robbing them at gunpoint. One of them resisted, and he shot her dead. The guy was obviously a psycho to begin with, but he also obviously had a lot to lose, so why did he do this?
It turns out he had a massive amount of gambling debt. As a matter of fact the cops arrested him while he was on the way to the Foxwoods casino with his fiancee. (He killed himself in jail awaiting trial.)
If you live in Connecticut now, or even if you don't, you might also know about the New Haven chief of police, who embezzled $80,000 from the evidence locker because, you guessed it, he had a gambling problem. The argument for legalizing gambling was always that it was happening anyway, you might as well let the state get some of the proceeds instead of the mafia, and you can regulate it. Uh huh. The mafia didn't advertise heavily during every sportscast, it didn't employ evil scientists to figure out exactly how to stimulate the dopamine receptors to keep people addicted and compulsive, and it didn't offer gambling opportunities on your (nonexistent) smartphone or at every convenience store.
As of 2024 (and I'm sure the numbers are higher now) more than half of adults buy lotteryckets, about 1/3 gamble in a casino at least once a year, and more than 1/4 bet on sports. Obviously approximately 100% of them lose money. Of those people, literally 70% to 80% or more report serious gambling problems including lying to hide their behavior, feeling withdrawal symptoms if they tried to stop, and 84% had financial problems resulting from their gambling. If you do the multiplication, that's something like 35-40% of the entire adult population.
Now you can't watch any major league sporting event without not only advertisements promoting gambling, but the announcers touting gambling in between play calls. Several cases of corruption have already been proved and I'm pretty sure that's just the tip of the old iceberg. The sports leagues are digging their own grave if people lose faith in the integrity of the game. This has got to stop.
1 comment:
Our whole fucking ECONOMY is based on gambling! The Dow Jones ... the Nasdaq-100 ... NPR and other "news announcers" repeat "the numbers," day after day ... with no understanding of it. Our crypto con man shithead "president" has opened the door to crypto ripoffs. I read about crypto for a living, man. I'd NEVER invest in it. Michael Saylor, former CEO of MicroStrategy, had his company buying up Bitcoin ... forecasts when BTC hit $125,000 last year existed for it to go "to the moon" and end up worth $1M per BTC ... I know it's bullshit because it's impossible, and crypto is basially a scam. Like tulips in Holland in 1637's market crash. It's all bullshit, and so is our country's economy. But the "masters of the universe" act like it can all go on forever, just as we can pollute the oceans and the atmosphere with no consequences ... HAH! But it ain't no joke. It's a Barnum-and-Bailey world, at least in the USA. Just as phony as it can be ... as phony as the piece of shit in the now-assaulted White House.
Of course gambling is infiltrating our society! The most obscene example is a lotter in which one poor sonofabitch wins a billion dollars ($500M after taxes) ... ruining their lives ... when we could have awarded 20,000 people $50,000 each! Every time we have the opportunity to do good for others, we fuck it up and poison their lives instead, like we do the environment.
We're gambling our very survival on many levels, and we're playing with an empty hand. It's all one rotten garment, spun from bogus thread.
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