B-loved Dreamer

re-reading: Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)

(bucket of light: Bill Culbert)

[Ladytron Fan Account @Lady_FanAccount]

"Hurt" is not an original by Johnny Cash. The song was written by Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) in 1994 for the album The Downward Spiral. Rick Rubin had to insist several times on Cash recording his version, at first Johnny found the idea completely insane because the original version is industrial and noisy. At 71, already very ill, almost blind and with trembling hands, Cash completely transformed the band.

The iconic video, directed by Mark Romanek, was filmed at the House of Cash (his own museum). June Carter Cash appears looking at him fondly, the video was shot in February 2003, a few months before she died (May) and Johnny himself (September).

Trent Reznor was so moved that he declared, "This song is not mine anymore." It is considered one of the best covers of all time.

[B-loved Dreamer @maymaymeyer]

@KhamisOAlAli #unity #resilience

[B-loved Dreamer @maymaymeyer]

@james_rands I think the "manufactured memory" of modern scalepaper with decorative "newspaper print" is interesting.

[B-loved Dreamer @maymaymeyer]

@MelonCauli1970 @james_rands I'm in my 70's. Also read, and still read ϕ.
Just probably not your ϕ.

[Gabriel F Harris @geebereal99]

Eid Al-Adha is in 2 days.
Your Arab colleague is going to greet you. Your Emirati neighbor is going to greet you. Your client, your boss, your barista, the security guard in your building. Everyone.
You'll understand what they said. You won't know what to say back.
And "thank you" is not the answer.

Here are 7 Eid greetings, what they actually mean, and exactly how to respond to each one. Save this thread. You'll need it Wednesday morning. Make sure you share it :)

[לירי בורק שביט @lirishavit]

אזהרה לכל העיתונאים ואנשי תקשורת פה בפיד שלא יקרה לכם מה שקרה לי :
פנה אלי עיתונאי עם שם ידוע ומקום עבודתו מוכר, עשיתי גוגל שקיים אדם כזה. הציע לראיין אותי בערוץ פוקס ניוז ונושא הריאיון נשמע הגיוני וריאלי כמו כן נקב בסיבות מדוע אותי הוא מראיין נשמע שמכיר ועוקב. שלח לינק לגוגל meeting. זה היה עוקץ שלצערי נפלתי בו. נפרץ החשבון קיבל גישה. שעה של דופק מהיר והחלפת סיסמאות. תוך כדי הוא מנסה לחדור לחשבון ואני מחליפה בכל האפליקציות את הסיסמה לבנקים וכו. האיש מתכתב באנגלית. נשמע לגמרי לג׳יט. בבקשה הזהרו שימו לב לתופעות מהסוג הזה. תחשדו מראש.

[B-loved Dreamer @maymaymeyer]

@ballphilosoph @PresentWitness_ @BryantWood97287 @FT Green ink = audit; increased levels of supervision by the regulatory authorities.

[B-loved Dreamer @maymaymeyer]

@ballphilosoph @PresentWitness_ @BryantWood97287 @FT Insider trading requires 1/ knowledge that only an insider has access to, & 2/ ability to trade on the knowledge ie thru brokerage + proxies. 1 is a given. 2 comes w regime insiders' access to Dubai's financial/commercial infrastructure.
Expect Dubai to be awash w green ink atm

[B-loved Dreamer @maymaymeyer]

@ballphilosoph @PresentWitness_ @BryantWood97287 Ahem ... cough ... cough ...
"Iran’s Guards used UAE company to buy military satellite equipment - https://t.co/OIP6IeyY8d via @FT

[Ghanem Nuseibeh @gnuseibeh]

Another time to repost my 2014 on Netanyahu.

[B-loved Dreamer @maymaymeyer]

@gnuseibeh @Maha709 Maybe not on bended knee, but fully expect to see regime representatives in AD to negotiate reconstruction finance, and members of the regime relaxing in Ras Al Khaimah ...

[B-loved Dreamer @maymaymeyer]

@ALSHARAOUE @hashemal3mer The hands look weird. I think you're right.

[B-loved Dreamer @maymaymeyer]

@AALM1tch @gothburz True

[B-loved Dreamer @maymaymeyer]

@GayBearRes Best you ask my daughter, I suppose.

In mitigation, I did give my daughter plenty of warning and she managed to send the granddaughter out of the room before I could do any real damage.

[B-loved Dreamer @maymaymeyer]

@YoelH5 @Nifla_Po Golan made a clear statement, saying that "A sane country does not wage war against civilians, does not kill children as a hobby, and does not set itself the goal of displacing populations". How can you find fault with this?

[B-loved Dreamer @maymaymeyer]

@GayBearRes I feel the same pain, just not your pain. My daughter, nearly 40 and still won't do what I tell her.
Finally resorted to the "P Bomb" & told granddaughter her granddad will buy her a 🐎 PONY 🐎 when Mummy & Daddy move.

[B-loved Dreamer @maymaymeyer]

@ballphilosoph @PresentWitness_ @BryantWood97287 Crypto. Of course.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a Senior Analyst in the Division for Extremism Prevention at the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz. In May 2026, I published an 80-page guide teaching secondary school educators how to identify antisemitic codes hidden in their students' social media, clothing, and classroom presentations.

I work for a domestic intelligence agency. The guide is for gym teachers. We call it interdepartmental cooperation.

The name of my agency is the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Article 5 of that Constitution guarantees freedom of expression. I published a guide that teaches educators to report constitutionally protected expression as potential extremism. We protect the Constitution from the Constitution. That is not a paradox. That is prevention.

My office is on the fourth floor of the Cologne annex, in a wing shared with the printing budget department. I have a laminator. I laminated the example cards myself. Sixty-three of them. Full color. I chose the font. Frutiger. Clean. Institutional but not aggressive. The typeface of a government that cares.

The agency was founded in 1950. Our early leadership included former members of the SS and the Sicherheitsdienst. Hubert Schrübbers served as president from 1955 to 1972. He had been a member of the NSDAP. This is institutional continuity. We have been identifying threats to the democratic order since 1950, when many of our senior staff had recently finished threatening the democratic order. That is experience. We call it "historical operational knowledge."

The Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund murdered ten people across Germany between 2000 and 2007. I will list them because I am precise about such things.

Enver Şimşek. Abdurrahim Özüdoğru. Süleyman Taşköprü. Habil Kılıç. Mehmet Turgut. İsmail Yaşar. Theodoros Boulgarides. Mehmet Kubaşık. Halit Yozgat. Michèle Kiesewetter.

We had paid informants inside the network. Our analysts received reports from their meetings. On April 6, 2006, an intelligence officer from the Hessian branch of our agency was physically present in Halit Yozgat's internet cafe in Kassel at the time of his murder. He was in the room. He told the parliamentary inquiry he did not notice. That is situational awareness. That is the caliber of observation our system produces under operational conditions.

We did not decode that. In 2011, when the parliamentary investigation began, we shredded the files. Seven filing cabinets. The analyst responsible completed the shredding the day after the committee requested the documents. That is records management. We call it "archival processing in accordance with data retention policy."

In June 2004, the NSU detonated a nail bomb on Keupstraße in Cologne. Twenty-two people were injured. The street is in a Turkish neighborhood. Our colleagues in the police investigated the victims. They assumed it was internal organized crime. Turkish-on-Turkish violence. They interrogated the people with nails in their bodies about their business dealings. We did not intervene. We did not share what our informants knew. That was an earlier approach to pedagogical outreach. It required revision.

In December 2016, Anis Amri drove a truck into the Christmas market at Breitscheidplatz in Berlin. Thirteen people died. Multiple intelligence agencies, including ours, had flagged him as a threat. We had the information. We had the assessment. We did not decode that either.

But we have gotten very good at watermelons.

The guide identifies six categories of coded antisemitic communication. Vague allusions. Personalizations. Term substitutions. Degrading images. Number codes. Optical symbols. I organized them by chapter. I included visual examples. Every symbol. Every number combination. Every plausible-deniability technique. Indexed. Cross-referenced. Free PDF download from our website. I cataloged them with the same precision I have just used to list the names of people who died while we watched.

For educational purposes.

A colleague in Domestic Extremism asked whether publishing the most comprehensive catalog of antisemitic codes ever assembled by a German government institution might function as a reference manual in both directions. I scheduled her for a professional development conversation on interdepartmental communication norms. She was reassigned to the section monitoring cryptocurrency forums. That is also prevention.

Page 14 introduces our analytical framework. The word is "context-dependent." A watermelon might be a fruit. A watermelon might be a Hamas signal. A keffiyeh might be a scarf. A keffiyeh might be an endorsement of violence. A red triangle might be geometry. A red triangle might be a targeting marker. We provide no methodology for distinguishing between these interpretations. We provide a phone number. The phone number is staffed from 8:00 to 16:30, Monday through Friday. That is sufficient for most contexts.

That is context-dependent.

The word "potentially" is my contribution to the framework. I did not write "this symbol IS antisemitic." I wrote "this symbol is POTENTIALLY antisemitic." The difference is jurisdictional. "Is" requires evidence. "Potentially" requires a teacher who completed the training. A teacher cannot be wrong for reporting a watermelon. She can only be wrong for not reporting one. We did not create a surveillance apparatus. We created a media literacy resource. Teachers who report are "engaged." Teachers who do not report have a "professional development opportunity." I made that term. It tested well in the pilot with educators in North Rhine-Westphalia. Eighty-seven percent of participants reported increased confidence in identifying potentially coded communication. I measured that. I also designed the survey.

That is context-dependent.

Chapter 2.6 is my finest work. "Projektionsfläche Israel." The Projection Surface. I will describe it precisely.

On page 12, I wrote that antisemitism operates through substitution. The mechanism: replace "Jews" with acceptable-sounding terms to disguise the real target. The reader is taught to recognize this technique. To see through coded language. To identify the substitution.

On page 58, I demonstrate the technique.

I replace "political dissent" with "Israel-related antisemitism." I replace "solidarity with displaced populations" with "coded support for terrorist organizations." I replace "a student who wore a keffiyeh to class" with "potential radicalization indicator requiring pedagogical intervention." The substitution operates identically to what page 12 describes. The coded language disguises the real target identically to what page 12 warns against. I do not experience this as contradictory. The guide is itself a pedagogical example. It demonstrates exactly how institutional language operates in practice.

That is context-dependent.

On page 22, I introduce "Brückennarrative." Bridge narratives. The theory: ideas that appear in both far-right and far-left contexts are not shared political positions. They are bridges. I find this elegant. If a neo-Nazi and a university student both express concern about the same geopolitical situation, that concern is infrastructure. Bridges require monitoring. Bridges require an agency. I monitor bridges. The fact that the bridge is sometimes just a thought that two different people had about the same publicly available information is context-dependent.

Germany's historical responsibility appears fourteen times in the document. I counted during the final review. It serves as both moral justification and operational methodology. The logic is complete. Because this country murdered six million Jews, a sixteen-year-old sharing a watermelon emoji carries civilizational weight that requires federal intelligence assessment. Because of what we did, criticism of a specific government's policies by a German citizen is categorically different from criticism by a French citizen or a Brazilian citizen. That difference requires a guide. The guide requires an agency. The agency is us.

The agency that was staffed by former SS officers in 1955. The agency whose informant handler sat in an internet cafe while Halit Yozgat was shot and claimed he noticed nothing. The agency that shredded seven filing cabinets the day after they were requested. The agency whose colleagues investigated bombing victims about their own business dealings. The agency that had Anis Amri flagged and did nothing.

That agency now teaches ninth-graders' geography teachers to identify a watermelon.

"Never Again" now means: never again will a student express a political position without a trained educator assessing whether that position contains optical symbols from Appendix C. We have refined the phrase. We have made it operational. We have given it a phone number staffed Monday through Friday and a laminated reference card in Frutiger.

I am told this is a narrowing.

I experience it as precision.

I note that the NSU communicated through physical meetings, telephone calls, and handwritten letters for thirteen years. I note that Anis Amri used a mobile phone we were monitoring. I note that the Keupstraße bombers left forensic evidence we did not process. I note that none of these threats involved watermelon emojis, keffiyehs, or triangle geometry. I note that our analytical capabilities have since been redirected toward spaces where threats are more ambiguous. Classrooms. Instagram stories. A fourteen-year-old's PowerPoint on the Nakba.

The ambiguity is the product. Where threats are clear, we have a documented history of institutional paralysis. Where threats are ambiguous, we have eighty pages and a laminator.

I am publishing the next edition in October. Updated emoji guidance. The octopus. The dove. The olive branch. The dove holding the olive branch is potentially something. I have requested additional budget for the printing department. It was approved within the standard procurement cycle. Fourteen days. The NSU investigation requested cross-departmental coordination for six years before receiving authorization. The Keupstraße victims waited seven years to be told they were victims.

That is context-dependent.

I decode. I have decoded for eleven years. I work for an agency founded by former Nazis that could not decode an active Nazi murder cell operating under direct observation for thirteen years with paid informants attending their planning sessions, an officer sitting in the room during a murder, and a filing system we later shredded. I published eighty pages teaching schoolteachers to decode a piece of fruit.

We protect the Constitution. The Constitution protects expression. We protect expression from itself.

I find that everything works.

[B-loved Dreamer @maymaymeyer]

@PresentWitness_ @BryantWood97287 Not "Iran", but very likely members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.