A few years ago, I made the mistake of following the Portland Police Department on Twitter. It was interesting in the beginning. Lately it is a sad commentary on the idiocy that has permeated our society. It was funny until it wasn’t. The tweets over the last month remind me of the overwhelmed substitute teacher in a high school classroom. Through political left influence and the “participation trophy” generation mindset, the police in the city have been reduced to begging the lawless to comply through social media.
It’s sad. The official Twitter account has tweeted things like, “Despite several public address announcements made regarding ongoing criminal activity outside of the Kelly Building, individuals in the group continued to launch rocks and explosive devices.”
Huh? The police are paying someone to tweet this? The real-world interpretation of the tweet is, “the bad guys won’t quit being bad even though we told them to quit on a loudspeaker.”
Read this one. “We apologize to the neighbors who are disturbed by the loudspeaker on the sound truck. We know it’s late. We have to keep our distance to avoid the items being used as weapons against us.” I am going to slowly slam my head into my desk, I would recommend you do the same. This is idiocy. Translation, “sorry to you law abiding citizens trying to get some sleep so you can work tomorrow, we are busy trying to stop some hoodlums with our powerful “sound truck” weaponry. Honest to God. Can you even imagine the Platte County Sheriff’s Department trying to break up a riot at the courthouse with a sound truck? I’m hoping we let them take guns and stuff.
Unfortunately, that is the future if we keep demonizing entire police departments over the actions of singular members of those departments. If we keep making police scared to do their jobs, they will officially become observers of the crime, tweeting us their apologies; fearful of the lawmakers, prosecutors and citizens that want to second guess their every move. It is scary to me and it should be to you. It’s not here yet, but it is a real possibility as the urban centers continue to push their agenda that lacks any personal responsibility component and instead handcuffs the very people we fund to protect us in the name of progress.
You been fishing for any big concert tickets? Big game tickets? Of course you haven’t. Want to know what might be worse than spending the whole year never looking at StubHub for that special ticket?
A guy by the name of Eric Baker bought StubHub for $4 billion dollars. in February. Ouch. This may have been what set the world off of its axis. Baker was one of the original founders of StubHub and eventually got fired from the place. He started a competing company overseas and then came back to stake his claim to the original creation. Armed with $4 billion of investor money, he bought it up.
Then on March 12, NBA player Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID and the rest is history. I am not an expert on business valuation, but I have to believe that months of no sports or concerts has StubHub worth significantly less today than it was in February. Industry experts are estimating the pandemic has erased 90% of the ticket brokers revenue.
Next time you are feeling sorry for yourself, remember that you did not fork over $4 billion for a business, days before a pandemic wiped it out. That is a hangover that would hard to recover from.
(Guy Speckman can be reached at gspeckman@me.com or searching for bargains on StubHub)