Dear Readers:
A few posts back we talked about the epidemic of online gambling (internet casinos) among the Ukrainian soldiers. Wherein the soldiers, on their Smartphones, gamble away their paychecks and fall into debt.
Ukrainian President Zelensky is attempting to do something about this. That’s not the surprising thing. The surprising thing is that the proposed regulations sound sensible. The reporter is Polina Salkova.
Zelensky has already signed an ukaz (on April 20) which attempts to restrict access to online casinos. The President has given the Ukrainian government one month to come up with a mechanism to: Limit adverts for online gaming; Forbid the creation of multiple accounts for the same person; Place temporary restrictions on the entire gaming process; Install a system of governmental monitoring.
The government also plans to conduct a national propaganda campaign on the negative consequences of gambling addiction.
Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief is advised to forbid access of soldiers to online casinos and other gambling sites. Taken all together, these new laws and measures should surely solve the problem.
That last bit was some sarcasm coming from me, but I repeat that this sounds sensible, and something every government should do. In fact, they should go even further and forbid online gambling altogether. If people want to gamble, they should have to appear in person and sit down at an actual, physical, table. Or at the street-corner cock-fighting pit. In my opinion.
Awful Avalanche 
No cock-fighting or any animal related fighting please! Cane Toad racing would be ok, so long as win or lose, Cane Toads are humanely put down at the end of all that business.
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Example: https://www.portdouglascanetoadracing.com.au/
but… they don’t get put down I think.
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“Don’t cane toads like pineapples?” he asked Dolefully. Being true Hawaiians and all. Australia has always been a place where introducing foreign vermin has created environmental chaos. Thinking of rabbits, cane toads and of course, the white man.
Zelensky and his gambling code. Good idea, doomed to fail. Like the US banning Tik Tok. Well, 61 billion Monopoly jackeroo dineroos are on the way to him, minus $50 billion for the US MIC, assorted expenses of $10 billion including Joe’s cut, leaving a billion for a few ATACMs and some food for the troops and to pay simple servants. The Ukrainians themselves? SOL.
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Yup, introducing the white man to Australia was the worst vermin of all. Shrimp on the barbie and that god-awful cockney accent!
Compared to that, the hares were downright beneficial. Grumpy, grumpy…
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Dear Beluga,
this elderly, white Australian lady, with 7 out of 8 great grandparents born in Australia, gets a little shirty at being addressed as “foreign vermin”, even in jest. She also does not like the epithet “settler”, which is intended to render white Australians as akin to those interloping “Israelis”. To draw similarities is simply foolish. We white Australians of Anglo working class stock did not “settle”, we escaped (that place where you were born). And for a time we thought we had a nation (which included aborigines and migrants). But our particular history is in the process of being cancelled, and this is disorientating and sad, and ultimately undermines any sense of an authentic Australian identity. Like I used to have.
Dear grumpy grumpy,
We never ever put “shrimp” on the barbie. We put prawns there. And it’s rabbits not hares, which are quite different. The “hareproof” fence? (Need I spell it out? Rabbit Proof Fence). And while I’m at it, we Australians always say Worcestershire sauce as “Wooster-sheer” sauce. Luckily you can’t hear me but the accent definitely isn’t cockney, although I grant you that to refined ears it is somewhat harsh. I try to avoid speaking as much as possible.
Must be something in the porridge. Thanking you for this indulgence, your faithful reader, that Australian lady.
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Well parried, Australian Lady! Just for the record, I never considered you personally to be vermin. Being an innocent victim of anti-Australian propaganda, I stand chastened about the prawns and rabbits.
By the way, you should never avoid speaking, even if your accent is somewhat harsh. You should hear mine, I don’t even know what to call it, but whatever it is, it is grotesque, for sure.
Your humble servant… etc etc
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“that god-awful cockney accent!”
I’m going to join OzLady with some “stern schoolmarm” correcting. No rulers across your knuckles, though. Cockney is a way different accent to Aussie. East Londoners are quick and sing-song, Strayans are slow and nasal. When I want to mimic a ‘Strine accent, which I sometimes do for satirical effect, I try to talk through my nose and draaaawl out the words. Along with suppressing the “aargh” sound of the letter “R”. Locals know I’m taking the Mick at them, but it’s done with humour, so I don’t get rubbished for it.
There used to be a lot more Cockney influence to Australian speech patterns in the days when immigration here was dominated by Brits. Which would be the period you’re thinking about. The “White Australia” policy — the actual term for it! — ended in the late 1960s when the leaders of this vast, empty land realised it was not smart to be an island of honkies in an Asian sea. Now the newcomers are heavily weighted toward Chinese and Indians. But I digress, as usual…
Cockney rhyming slang used to be a big thing here circa the 1940s and 50s. (OzLady can correct me if I’m getting this wrong.) To show how witty they were, Cockneys and Aussies would make convoluted references that rhymed. Instead of saying “I’m going home to the wife” they’d say “I’m going home to the trouble and strife.” The listener was left to infer what they were getting at. I’ve listened to examples on old TV shows and such and often can’t make hide nor hare (sic) of them. “Time to hit the frog and toad” — i.e. “the road” — is one of the easier ones. Since we’re talking about hitting toads…
I’ve probably brought up the Cockney slang term for Americans on your blog before: “seppo.” Which is the colloquial name for “septic tank.” Of course, that rhymes with “Yank.” It was well-known in the World War II era, but when I say it now, in a self-deprecating way, nobody under 60 has a clue what I’m on about. Too bad, because the Cockney speech pattern had its peculiar charms.
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I was probably thinking about the really old days, when the English opened up their jail cells and dispatched the gangs of criminal Cockneys to Australia! They went on to found the new nation.
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Don’t forget the Oirish! The Emerald Isle was a full-fledged colony, and when any of those Papist renegades crossed the line, they’d get slapped in chains and shipped to the other hemisphere. The lucky ones who weren’t hanged, that is. And they WERE lucky! The got to avoid starving to death in the Potato Famine.
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I’ve read that you DON’T want to put them down using a cricket bat or a golf club, which are the commonly-used instoadments of messy destruction. Because some of the juice from their poison sacs might splash into your eyes. Remember kids, if you’re going to beat a noxious amphibian into a red-and-green pulp, wear your safety goggles!
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Good advice! Kids, listen to your Uncle Bukko, he knows what he is talking about.
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How about cockroach racing? Oh well, there is always good old-fashioned horse racing. Not to mention Jai Alai.
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What is the greater crime? Gambling among the soldiers or the forced conscription of old men and then sending them to the front will almost no training or support? Zelensky is putting a band-aid on a sucking chest wound.
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Well, gambling itself isn’t a crime. It’s just dumb. Those soldiers who survive the carnage will be returning to their homes without any money saved up.
I agree that forced conscription is a crime, especially of the elderly, and of women.
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I think the essential crime is in prioritizing a societal vice over sitting down with Russia and negotiating an end to the dying. Zelensky has one month left before he becomes a nobody again. Solving a gambling problem is not going the win the war, nor even even reduce any of the social hardships that matter most. Losing a loved one to a lost cause is far worse than a nebulous debt that becomes worthless when Ukraine collapses into nothingness. I don’t think we should trivialize the actual harm that is occurring to this ancient people of the Steppe.
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Why do the Ukrainian soldiers gamble? It is a distraction from the reality they face that they will be lucky to survive the next 24 hours. These are men without hope. Their horizons are bounded by death and despair. What prissy bastard would begrudge them such a diversion?
Oh, well, they may not have any money when they come home because they gambled it all away suggests the prude. Reality check: they will count themselves fortunate indeed if they get back to their homes. Let them gamble. What else do they have?
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Yalensis, the cynic in me is inclined to say the background to this story isn’t really about the pernicious effects of online gambling. Businessman and owner of Cosmolot (the online casino) is one Arnulf Damerau, and he’s accusing the Zelensky regime of corruption. Well well, goodness me. Corruption!
https://www.ft.com/content/47ab8286-248d-4fec-80ce-b08ed1409243
https://tass.com/world/1777161
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I am shocked, absolutely shocked, to learn that this online gambling casino owner spilled the beans on Zelensky’s corruption!
Thanks for those links, AL, as usual you have delved to the actual heart of the matter. So, Zelensky is not anti-vice per se. As Ostap Bender might say, “A competitor has appeared…”
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Gambling is perfectly natural behaviour when you think you’re going to die.
We ate our breakfast lying on our backs,
Because the shells were screeching overhead.
I bet a rasher to a loaf of bread
That Hull United would beat Halifax
When Jimmy Stainthorpe played full-back instead
of Billy Bradford. Ginger raised his head
And cursed, and took the bet; and dropt back dead.
We ate our breakfast lying on our backs,
Because the shells were screeching overhead.
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That’s a great poem! Did you write it, or is it out there?
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“Breakfast” by Wilfred Wilson Gibson. A World War I poem, although as far as I know he did not serve.
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This poem only proves my point, though. The gambling itself was innocuous, since the guys are only betting small items, like loaf of bread, and not big money. So that those who DO miraculously survive will still have some money when they return home. Ginger would have been okay if he had kept his head down. It wasn’t the petty gambling that killed him, it was the fact that he poked his head up!
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Aha, but he wouldn’t have poked his head up if he hadn’t been gambling! He’d just have peacefully eaten his breakfast lying on his back, at least until the phosgene shells started landing.
If you lose, of course, you lost big, but then you’ll probably be killed and it doesn’t matter. If you win, of course, you might also win big, but then you’ll probably be killed and it doesn’t matter.
If you remember, in CATCH-22 Milo Minderbinder bets his entire commercial operation (he controls the import-export trade in the Mediterranean theatre) on cornering the market in Egyptian cotton, only to have the entire bottom fall out of the market. If he hadn’t been able to sell the cotton to the Nazis he would have lost everything, everything, so sad!
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I see that it is a form of nihilism after people have just lost hope, or don’t even care any more if they live or die. I think the solution is to give them something to hope for, something that makes them believe there will actually be a future. They need to have a glimpse of that possible future…
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I see your old pal Raghead did a cartoon panel about this very issue! Probably inspired by your first post on gambling from the trenches. Because I haven’t seen this issue mentioned elsewhere. I’ll blog-whore (toon-whore?) his work here since he’s not doing it in your comments any more.
What did you do to alienate him, Yalensis? Imagine that — you chased off a fiendly terrorist. With chops like that, Satanyahoo should hire you to harrass Hamas.
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I don’t know what happened to Raghead. I miss him, and I don’t know why he left. Was it something I said?
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P.S. – that’s a great cartoon, by the way.
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Who can tell? Peoples’ enthusiasm for yapping websites waxes and wanes. Raghead/Bis used to be a frequent voice on Larry Johnson’s site, often near the top of comment threads. (Some commenter asked him how he did that, and it was because Rag’s RSS feed alerted him when something new came up.) Then he stopped. I caught his nym on MOA not long ago, crowing about how his cartoon site had been added to the Myrtovets kill list. Maybe he’s got things happening in his real-world life and he’s too preoccupied to commentoviate much. OR MAYBE HE’S LAID LOW WITH LONG COVID!!!! (that’s what I wonder about everybody when I don’t see them in person or online for a while…)
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Well, if Raghead is still busy drawing cartoons from his long-covid death-bed, he could bloody well still lift one trembling, skeletal finger to post a comment on my blog! If just to say that he is still alive!
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