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New study: gambling hurts the poorest people in society

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The Albany Times-Union reports on a new study on gambling. (H/T Al Mohler podcast)

Excerpt:

Few things are clear about the expansion of casinos in New York, but additional slot machines will add significantly to problem gambling and may not be economically rewarding for the state, according to a fresh study by the Institute for American Values.

Note, the IAV’s president is a pro-gay-marriage moderate. Don’t be fooled by the conservative name.

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The institute’s new report, “Why Casinos Matter,” is based on several government and academic studies here and abroad. The authors arrived at several conclusions:

The new American casino is mostly a center filled with slot machines — essentially sophisticated computers designed to addict players. The machines figure out betting patterns and provide just enough in rewards to keep a person hooked for hours. “The more you play, the more you lose,” the report says, backing up the statement with findings by MIT anthropologist Natasha Schull. Schull details her observations in the 2012 book “Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas.”

Modern slot machines “engineer the psychological experience of being in the ‘zone’ — a trancelike state that numbs feeling and blots out time/space. For some heavy slot players, the goal is not winning money,” the study said.

Casinos depend on problem gamblers for their revenue base, drawing 40 to 60 percent of slot machine revenues from these people, many of whom are low rollers.

Living near a casino or working at a casino increases the chance of becoming problem gambler. Those who live within 10 miles of a casino are twice as likely to be a problem gambler than those who do not.

Problem gambling is more widespread than many casino industry leaders claim. The problem gamblers frequently go to a casino, and their lives and livelihoods may be adversely affected by their betting. They are not necessarily the heavy gamblers who are pathological and who suffer from increasing preoccupations to gamble and a loss of control.

The benefits of casinos are short-term and easy to measure, but many costs pop up during the longer term that are harder to quantify. Economic stimulus fades after the casino becomes a dominant business that drives out established local businesses, such as restaurants, replacing them with pawnshops, auto title lenders and check-cashing stores. And since problem gambling develops over four to seven years, the stress on families and finances may gradually become apparent.

State regulation of casinos creates a conflict of interest. Government is supposed to protect people from harmful business practices, but the state is a partner with casinos or is co-sponsoring gambling. In New York, the Cuomo administration announced last week that it anticipates $430 million a year in annual revenues — $192 million for local governments and $238 million for schools or property tax relief — from four new upstate casinos. The New York Division of the Lottery reported almost $9 billion in revenues last year, a record, with more than $3 billion of that going to public education.

Although people on the left, like Mario Cuomo, like to talk about helping the poor, they actually favor policies that hurt the poor. It’s very important to separate what people say in front of cameras with what effects their policies actually cause. Good effects are more important than good intentions.

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UK prosecutors refuse to charge doctors who perform sex-selection abortions

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From the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Britain’s top law officer is to come under pressure in the House of Commons this week to say why the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to prosecute over the gender selection abortion scandal.

Dominic Grieve, the attorney general, will face questions from Tory MPs who want the Government to tighten up the 1967 Abortion Act in the wake of the scandal.

The comments come as Britain’s most senior prosecutor prepares to release a paper justifying his decision not to prosecute two doctors over an abortion scandal.

The Tory party is the conservative party of the UK, although they aren’t very conservative. Still, sex-selection abortion is such a heinous crime that even they are shocked by it. To kill a person simply because she is female and not male? That’s that real war on women right there. A war on women by leftists, where conservatives take the side of the women.

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Two doctors were exposed by an undercover Daily Telegraph investigation offering to abort babies because of their gender.

The Telegraph’s probe prompted a 19 month investigation. However prosecutors told the doctors that they will not be charged even though there was enough evidence, because it did not consider the issue to be in the public interest.

Mr Starmer has not commented on his reasons not to prosecute and is due to issue his reasons in the coming days, before he stands down as DPP at the end of this month.

The CPS said the key reason for the decision was that the doctors would still be investigated by the General Medical Council.

Mr Starmer was criticised by his predecessor as DPP Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, who said the decision had been “very dubious”.

Lord Macdonald said this amounted to letting them “avoid criminal action” because of their professional status – undermining the basic principle that “everyone is equal under the law”.

The two doctors, Dr Prabha Sivaraman and Dr Palaniappan Rajmohan, have had restrictions placed on their work while they are investigated by the GMC.

Meanwhile, in Australia, doctors are being persecuted for not performing sex-selection abortions.

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How do children end up fatherless? One woman’s story

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Dina sent me this revealing article from the UK Daily Mail. It tells the story of a woman whose children are fatherless.

Excerpt:

My marriage ended, without rancour or argument, 18 months after it had begun. There was no recrimination, just a realisation, as sharp as physical pain, that we would never — could never — agree on one fundamental point.

I wanted children; my husband Anthony did not. You may think we should have resolved this crucial issue long before we bought a house and vowed to spend the rest of our lives together, but love had a way of blinding us to the depth of our disagreement.

[…]Today, I am 37 and a single mum to gorgeous three-month-old twin boys Charlie and William. They were conceived through IVF, using my eggs and sperm from an anonymous donor, and the love I feel for them is all-consuming.

[…]Anthony, a policeman, was easy and fun; we chatted comfortably together, and when we started dating I was impressed by his integrity. He had passionate views about fairness and loyalty. He was attractive, too — tall, dark hair, blue eyes — and I felt we could build a loving relationship together.

It seems to me that many women tend to prefer the wrong kind of men these days when it comes to marriage and parenting. Marriage requires a man to have a strong moral compass. That way, he can be expected to behave morally, himself. A man with a strong moral compass fuldills his moral obligations, but he also makes moral judgments. And women need to prefer men who make these moral judgments. The woman’s phrase “Easy and fun” tells me that her choice of man was not a good one. A man who is easy and fun does not make divisive truth claims, does not make moral judgments, and does not set up moral boundaries. He can’t be trusted to honor moral obligations. He can only be trusted to be “easy and fun”. But marriage is not for men who want an easy life, nor a fun life. Marry requires self-sacrificial service. She should not have chosen an “easy and fun” man to have children with. That would be like me choosing a Paris Hilton and expecting her to be frugal and homeschool our kids. It’s not going to happen. But many women these days are so clouded by “tall, dark hair, blue eyes” that they cannot connect what a man can do to what a man is supposed to do in a marriage. So long as he looks good, then he is good.

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After a month or so, our physical relationship began, but we did not rush things. It was a couple of years before he moved into my flat in Crawley, West Sussex, and I expected we’d eventually marry and have kids.

Looking back, I suppose I should have heeded the warning signals. When I broached the subject of children, he stalled. His stock reply was: ‘We’ll have them later.’

So although he was non-committal, I loved him and assumed that his paternal instinct would kick in as he grew older. But the years passed and I was not reassured.

She thinks that a man who agrees to recreational sex after a month and then agrees to cohabitation after two years is the kind of man who is capable of making a lifelong commitment to be faithful to her and to raise children. That strikes me as equivalent to saying that a man whose favorite movie is Top Gun would also make a good airline pilot.

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And then I reached 30. My friends were marrying; settling into comfortable domesticity, preparing for parenthood, and Anthony and I were still in this limbo.

[…]Then my best friend announced she was pregnant and the joy I felt for her was tainted by Anthony’s absence of commitment to the idea of having children with me. So we had another discussion — this time, it was a passionate one. ‘It’s a deal-breaker,’ I said. ‘Much as I love you, if you don’t want children we can’t carry on.’

But, again, he assured me that it would all happen. I just had to bide my time.

So I waited until Anthony was 30, an age when I felt he was old enough to settle down. We loved each other whole-heartedly; we’d bought two successive homes together and the understanding was implicit: my future was bound up in his.

[…]I wanted so much to believe he would warm to the idea, but Anthony equivocated. He still wasn’t ready, he protested.

[…]But then Anthony demonstrated just how strong his aversion to babies was. We were visiting a friend who’d recently given birth and, when her baby cried, Anthony made his excuses and went home.

‘I just can’t stand the sound of that crying,’ he said testily when I confronted him later. ‘If we had a baby, I’d have to move out for the first six weeks.’

It wasn’t a propitious sign, but eventually he seemed to soften.

‘If we’re going to have children, we’ll have to get married first,’ he said the next time I raised the subject, and for once I agreed absolutely. We should get married; by making a public commitment to stay together for the rest of our lives, we would be taking the first step towards establishing a secure home for our future babies.

[…]After six months as man and wife, there had been no mention from Anthony of children. So one day, as we walked home from town, I broached the subject again.

‘We can’t afford to have children,’ he responded sharply and, rather than discuss the topic further, he marched off ahead of me.

[…]This was not the life I had planned for myself: for the first time I started to feel anger towards Anthony. I felt he had forced this situation onto me.

The woman went on to have fatherless children using taxpayer-funded IVF.

What I find troubling about this story is that the first instinct of women – Christian women – and Christian pastors – is to blame men. Those rotten, no-good men. With their tallness, blue-eyes and dark hair! They are “easy and fun” one minute, and then the next minute they are… easy and fun. Yeah. Good-looking men who are easy and fun cannot be assumed to be good at marriage and parenting. They cannot be assumed to be good providers. They can’t be assumed to be good protectors. They can’t be assumed to be moral leaders. They can’t be assumed to be spiritual leaders. The faster that we learn to judge women who make poor decisions with men, the better it will be for children who need to 1) not be killed in the womb and 2) not grow up fatherless. The loving thing to do is to hold women accountable for making decisions about men with their eyes, instead of with their minds.