Reblog: Pinoy to Pay Hefty Casino Entrance Fee

This article look at how people in Singapore goes around being put on the casino's exclusion list by their family members.

REBLOG Light and Easy Talk:
Every nation wants a casino to tap the super profits but they don’t want their citizens to gamble. This is just like robbers want to rob people but they don’t like it when they are robbed. XingCai Gambling Tales has interesting thoughts on gambling issue.

REBLOG On Empty Thoughts: Pinoy to Pay Hefty Casino Entrance Fee:
A proposed bill in Congress will impose a P3,500 entrance fee for all Filipinos patronizing casinos. Addicts to Hell looks at the consequences of barring your citizen from the casino ...

Anything Under the Sun: Ohio Approves Preshuffled-cards

The insight in looking at the human side as an area of failure is a good analysis. However this should be no concern to gamblers. One gambler's attempt to cheat will not cause another gambler any harm.

Anything Under the Sun: Ohio Approves Preshuffled-cards
: Ohio Casino Control Commission (OCCC) has approved the use of pre-shuffled cards in the state's casinos. It made me reflect on the unshuffled cards causing a casino millions and Brogata accusing Phil Ivey for collaborating with the card manufacturer to mark cards to be used in play. While the unshuffled card at Golden Nugget Atlantic City may be a one in a lifetime affair, Brogata's wild accusation could possibility become a regular affair with this new regulation.

Reblog: Watchdog to Named and Shamed Bookies

Targeting the innocent is the way of the terrorist. Allowing minor to gamble is as bad.

REBLOG Anything Under the Sun: Watchdog to Named and Shamed Bookies: Saving the Gaming Industry Bookies who break promises on advertising will be "name and shame" by a new watchdog. This watchdog should also penalize those who admit minors. This ruling is often violated and never taken seriously...

The Jihadi Highway

The ISIS had sunk its tendrils deep into Turkey after the nation was named as part of a Nato alliance to combat the jihadis group. US President Barack Obama said Turkey was part of a “core coalition” to fight Isis at the NATO sunmit in Wales. Stories shared with Newsweek in recent days by Deniz Sahin revealed this finding. Deniz ex-husband was a former alcoholic who had kicked his addiction and turned instead to fundamentalist Islam. Her ex-husband, Sadik, sent her photos a week after taking their children to Isis-controlled Raqqa province. Many fear ISIS would wreak havoc in a nation that attracts 35 million tourists a year. Deniz and other victims of Isis speak of their frustration at police inaction and of their powerlessness to retrieve their loved ones. In her extended family alone, Deniz says, 15 people – including five children – have gone to live under Isis rule or fight in its ranks in recent months.

Other had echoed Deniz's story. They describe an organized recruiting network operating online and through religious study groups. They are targeting young men from Sunni Muslim districts plagued by poverty and drug addiction. One family, whose son joined Isis, says that he was among 19 young men from their neighborhood alone who left for Syria recently, with at least four others planning to join them soon. In June, Turkey’s Milliyet newspaper reported that as many as 3,000 Turks have joined the group. "No other NATO country is as exposed to the threat of Isis jihadism as Turkey is," says Sinan Ulgen, a former diplomat and head of Edam, an Istanbul-based foreign policy think tank.

Dilovasi has long been notorious in Turkey as an industrial dystopia. A town of 45,000, it hosts some 150 factories focused around dirty industries such as scrap metal smelting and paint manufacturing. The air is thick with an acrid chemical stench, and a study by a local university in 2004 found that cancer rates here are two and half times higher than the national average. Meanwhile, Kenan says, it is a haven for cemaats and tarikats – conservative religious movements, which were suppressed by Turkey’s secularist governments but have flourished under the Islamist-rooted administration of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Women of West Point

Brave Heart

The heart of a hero is the essence that drive a person to join the jihadis or serve the army. For women jihadis, "potential recruits are told their main role in the Islamic revolution will be through matrimony and childbearing, not martyrdom," [Daily Beast, 3 Sep 2014]. In contrast the American military will be opening combat positions to qualifying women by 2016.

Admission of Women

Since West Point opened its doors to women in 1976, there had been some women with outstanding achievements. Lindsey Danilack was the the top cadet at West Point, Class of 2014. She was not the first women to hold this position but the fourth. This article on New York Time Magazine takes a peek into the aspiration of the Women at West Point.

Leadership

Women had long been in position of leadership in both political and commercial arena. “If someone tells me I can’t run as fast as the guys running the two-mile, I say, ‘You’re right.’ ... But if they say that I can’t be as good a leader as them, oh, I’ll challenge them on that,” Danilack said.

Physical Fights

According to biologically, males are suppose to be stronger than women so I had always wonder about a physical fight between the genders. This was answered by Cadet Oriana Ellis. She said, “I always came in here with the mind-set that anything a guy could do, I could do. . . . I never really got the mental check until combative, when I had to fight a guy that was the same weight as me, and my M.C.L. was sprained within the first couple seconds, because I didn’t realize that guys were actually more dense than girls.”

Expressing Affection

As much as woman strive for equality, the law of nature that the opposite attracts could not be ignored. Here is a glimpse on romantic life at West point. “When you go into someone’s room, you have to leave the door open because you’re always being monitored. It’s hard to ‘cadate.’ There’s no hand-holding, no affection and no getting away. . . . West Point does discourage dating in the same company,” Alexandra Efaw said.

Bonding

Bonding is paramount for the military. Without esprit de corps any military group will breakdown. “What I like most about West Point is the relationships you make here because of what you go through and how stressful it is. A week is like a month in real life. . . . We have this unique experience that we’re all sharing with each other, which is why a lot of the people get engaged and married at West Point. And they might not even be dating for a year,” Anastasia Efaw said.

Why Westerners Are Joining Jihadi Movements

Michael Muhammad Knight blames the American value system for breading jihadis in the Washington Post dated 3 Sep 2014. Knight was a wannabe jihadi who never was. He ditched his Catholic high school in upstate New York to study at a Saudi-funded madrassa in Pakistan twenty years ago. He gave his account on the jihadi appeal to Westerners.

GI Joe Cartoons

Knight had grown up in the Reagan 80's. Lyrics in the G.I. Joe 's theme song, "fight for freedom, wherever there's trouble," had a great influence on him. It lead him to assume that individuals had the right — and the duty — to intervene anywhere on the planet where they perceived threats to freedom, justice and equality. As a result he believed "that working toward justice was more valuable than my own life".

The Heroic Glamor

Fighting for the oppressed and protecting the safety and dignity of others had a heroic glamor. Doing your part for king and country just don't fit the bill. These heroes wannabe would fly across the globe to throw themselves into freedom struggles that are not their own to attain greater honor. For Knight, this is a "very, very American thing to do".

Might is Right

War movies subtly groom their viewers to love violence and view military conquest as a benevolent act. It glorifies military sacrifice. This is reinforced with medal of honors. That is what brave men do. Might is required and necessary to bring about a world in the vision of the oppressed. If it requires giving up your life to achieve this end, then your sacrifice is worthwhile and heroic. Your death would be perceived as honorable.

Holier than the Blood of Martyrs

Knight made an interesting comment. He said that the traditionalists told him that he would be more useful as a scholar than as a soldier. They reminded him of their prophet's statement that, "the ink of scholars was holier than the blood of martyrs". I believe this is the main idea behind Knight's walking away form the jihadi's path. If only jihadis had reflected on this harmonious path, the world would be more peaceful.

The Bride of ISIS

Western women married to jihadi warriors of ISIS were using tweets and blogs in their recruitment drive. They were persuading would-be “sisters” in Europe and the United States to travel to the Middle East to help this group build its extremist vision of an Islamic society.

Aqsa Mahmood revealed to the Daily Beast that she is one of the female jihadists that they had reported in their 08.06.14 article. The 20-year-old confessed that she operates under the Twitter user name "Umm Layth". Throughout Umm Layth’s posts and those written by other jihadist women there is a morbid obsession with martyrdom. "Allahu Akbar, there's no way to describe the feeling of sitting with the Akhawat [sisters] waiting on news of whose Husband has attained Shahadah [martyrdom]," writes Umm Layth.

Mahmood's distraught Pakistani-born parents warned yesterday: "If our daughter who had every chance and freedom in life could become a bedroom radical, then it is possible for it to happen to any family." Martyrdom had always been an appealing concept. Intentional martyrdom, however, would defeat the purpose of sacrificing one's own life for their God.