For a whole year some guy was running around San Antonio, Texas burning down dozens of cell towers. And nobody figured it out to stop him after the fourth, fifth, sixth… time? All that talk about a wall seems cheap when Texas can’t seem to keep a door closed.

And then to top it off it was a “witness” and an “accomplice” who finally turned him in? Either this criminal mastermind wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, or Texas was too busy being tough on innocent immigrants to notice the domestic terrorist destroying critical infrastructure over and over and over again.

Coley Lane Dupre was 19 at the time when she said she was Sean Smith’s lookout as he entered a cell site dressed as a construction worker. When she was identified on a surveillance photo, she confirmed to authorities that Smith was the arsonist.

[…]

“Witnesses reported the defendant was on a ‘mission’ [April 2021 to May 2022] to destroy the 5G towers because he hated the Government and believed they were spying on him,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Roomberg wrote in a sentencing memorandum.

“The SAFD arson investigator’s expert opinion is the modus operandi of the other 16 cellular tower arsons match the six towers for which the Defendant pled guilty and that the same person committed all 22 arsons,” said Roomberg.

A bonfire party at a cell tower twice a month for a whole year where it reads like he wore the same disguise (orange shirt and white hard hat), used the same accomplice and methods? Seriously, how did this guy not get caught and exposed after the first or second time?

He was just sentenced a couple months ago to 78 months on his guilty plea. Notably he’s already a felon who has been in jail before.

The 30-year-old was arrested during a traffic stop on May 13, 2022, during which law enforcement officers located a handgun on the floorboard in front of the driver’s seat. Investigators executed a search warrant for Smith’s apartment on May 15, 2022, and found additional firearms. Smith had previously been convicted of possessing firearms on two occasions, serving more than a year imprisonment on each.

The seemingly lax response to arson by this guy reminds me of a Texas musician from back in 1991 who sang about it as a hobby…

But seriously, this seems to be a case of an American idiot who was easily duped by Russian propaganda.

…RT’s disinformation campaign against 5G – seemingly created to hinder the global roll-out of the technology so Russia can catch up – has since spread to a network of blogs and social media accounts, where it has been decoupled from Moscow’s propaganda firehose. […] In a Facebook post on March 30, the attorney and anti-vaccination activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., son of Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of former US president John F. Kennedy, also shared the conspiracy theory linking 5G to coronavirus. Global lockdown, he said, was stopping people from protesting to prevent “5G robber barons from microwaving our country and destroying nature”.

Oh, the irony of instigating bored Texas gun-nuts to light cell towers on fire by convincing them that it somehow will preserve nature. That’s Russian humor for you.

In actual fact, Russia’s disinformation campaign to hinder the 5G rollout in the West proved so effective that starting April 2020 nearly 80 towers were burned in the UK.

Tough talkin’ Texas (known for generating the phrase all hat no cattle) clearly missed the security memo.

Everyone has surely known this for years, given MobileEye and NVidia both dumped partnerships with Tesla due to concerns about fraud. NVidia even ranked Tesla last in driverless tech after the split.

Welp, here it is again in black and white from the IIHS.

…in a series of tests conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an independent safety inspector. […] The tests found that “Full Self Driving” — a feature that, as of last month, was available in beta to about 400,000 Tesla drivers — was the most unsafe…

It’s like a tragic version of Dr. Seuss. A rail worker peacefully enjoying nature during his lunch break was violently attacked and killed by a “death trap” robot on wheels made by the fascist brand Tesla.

A man working on WA’s Metronet rail project has died at a park in Perth’s northeast.

The 59-year-old subcontractor was on his lunch break, sitting under a tree near the new Bayswater station, when he was hit by a Tesla sedan.

Twitter not only is a toxic platform, the largest hate rally in history, it’s also engaged in egregious stock manipulation by robots to fund the haters.

Of 157,000 tweets posted to the hashtag #TSLA, 23% were from bots, the research showed.

Kirsch and Chowdhury tracked 186 Tesla-related bot accounts and found that after each was launched, the company’s stock appreciated more than 2%. (They looked at the average stock return for the week previous to the bot’s creation and for the week following.)”

“This computational content may have buffered the Tesla narrative from an emergent group of critics, relieved downward pressure on the Tesla stock price and amplified pro-Tesla sentiment from the time of the firm’s IPO in June 2010 to the end of 2020,” reads a paper that the researchers plan to present at the International Electric Vehicle Symposium in June in Oslo.”

Related: Nearly 80% of X Twitter traffic is now just bots.