Sunday, July 30: X Giving Us Nothing
No use in quitting now, might as well tear the whole thing down
The city of San Francisco has filed a complaint and opened an investigation into a giant “X” sign that was installed on Friday on top of the downtown building formerly known as Twitter headquarters. This is the latest desperate attempt by the Elongated Muskrat to try and rebrand his pet social media platform.
City officials say replacing letters or symbols on buildings, or erecting a sign on top of one, requires a permit for design and safety reasons. And guess who’s out here breaking rules and creating permit-less chaos?? It’s everyone’s favorite emerald-mine idiot prince.
The giant pulsating X appeared after San Francisco police stopped workers earlier last week from removing the brand’s iconic bird and logo from the side of the building, saying they hadn’t taped off the sidewalk to keep pedestrians safe if anything fell. Any replacement letters or symbols would require a permit to ensure “consistency with the historic nature of the building” and to make sure additions are safely attached to the sign, according to a spokesperson for the Department of Building Inspection.
The funniest possible outcome here is either a class-action lawsuit from the residents in the surrounding buildings for the constant disturbance, or that the giant X outweighs the handful of sandbags currently weighing it down and tumbles to the ground, impaling Musk on its way.
Side Items
Israeli Surveillance in Texas: This article covers the story of the Texas state police who figured the best way to approach the “border crisis” was by utilizing apartheid-Israeli phone tracking software. One of the private companies that these idiot officers partnered with was Cobwebs Technologies, a little-known Israeli surveillance contractor. Cobwebs’s top product, the surveillance platform Tangles, offers its users a wealth of different tools for tracking people as they navigate both the internet and the real world, mining social media posts, app activity, facial recognition, and phone tracking for details. In August 2021, the Texas department of public safety’s intelligence and counterterrorism division purchased a year subscription of Tangles access for $198,000. The state has renewed its Tangles subscription twice since then
Mississippi Mental Health Treatment: sheriff’s department staff in Mississippi’s Benton County are not to be confused with mental health professionals. This article describes in vivid detail how, in Mississippi, serious mental illness or substance abuse can result in incarceration, even if you aren’t charged with a crime. The state is an outlier in jailing so many people for so long, but many state officials say they don’t have another option. Since 2006, at least 13 people have died in Mississippi county jails while they awaited treatment for mental illness or substance abuse. Nine of the 13 killed themselves, and at least 10 of them hadn’t been charged with any crime. When there’s no place to adequately address a mental health crisis, the solution probably isn’t to just throw people in cages