Simply put, if done slowly enough, a frog will willingly allow you to boil him.

This very same method is used by governments and corporations against large groups of humans to achieve goals that would be untenable to accomplish quickly.

Let’s say a company or government (remember, governments are businesses and nothing else) wants to raise rates or taxes by 50%. Simply raising them by 50% would provoke an outrage from the citizenry. Instead, they raise it by 2% a month, and in little over two years, they have their increase with little resistance. It’s a means to an end. It’s a method to obtain things which would otherwise be unobtainable.

After all, what pathetic loser tightwad can’t afford a 2% increase? Sure you will get a little bitching and moaning along the way, but nobody is going to revolt over two percent. It’s two F’ing percent, what’s the big deal?

You can tweak the percentages and time, but you get the gist. You get your 50%, and the people shut the hell up.

It’s not just money, though.

Imagine a president standing up and declaring that the Bill of Rights were hereby null and void. There might be riots in the streets. It would be too messy.

It’s much more sustainable to chip away at rights. Take a minor right away here, another one there, claim it’s for people’s protection and security, and tell them that the rights are being taken away to keep them free. Give them flags to wave and put singing competitions on television so they don’t think about it too much.

If done slowly enough, over the course of time, you can turn a free country into a totalitarian police state, and the population will not only go along with it, but they might just cheer you along the way.

Thus, the frog in the boiling pot, frying pan, etc.

We are the “frogs”. Once we get fully acclimated to the loss of a few minor and inconsequential rights (the right to play games online as an example), a few more minor rights will be taken away. Then a few more. Then a few more.

There won’t be a mass outrcry, because the rights of only a small segment of the population will be taken each time.

Then end result will be the same, though. An almost complete evisceration of civil liberties a/k/a “boiled”.

I doubt the bureaucrats could come up with this seizure idea on their own… my guess is there’s some right wing conservative lobby (same people who ran the “swift boat” ads and got Bush re-elected in 04?) who pushed the feds into this. Maybe they’re trying to get Frank’s bill defeated? Who knows what lengths these people will go to to push their own agendas?

I’m so disgusted, can’t even muster a good rant. Regulation would solve the problem—and give the big boys their cut, which is what this is all about, ultimately—but who do you think will be the first big online rooms out of the gate in a US market? The same bunch of thieving hooligans doing their damndest to run LV into the ground.

You know the global free market—such as it was—worked pretty well, gambling wise, pre UIGEA. I’d like to go back to it. Not gonna happen, though.

It is only going to get worse. You can thank the 70 millions idiots who voted for him!