‼️🇩🇪 This is what German police actually do with their time now. Going door to door, seizing tablets and phones from pensioners over memes and tweets. The case of the Fortnite teen getting accused for cursing out Olaf Scholz is not an isolated one. Prosecutors can now open cases on their own under "special public interest." The politician doesn't need to file anything. The result is a steady drip of cases that look insane from the outside and barely register inside the system. Germany has a law problem. The §188 StGB statute, "insulting a person of political life," got beefed up by the Bundestag in 2021. This has led to the following absurd cases: - Pimmelgate (2021): Hamburg interior senator Andy Grote got called a "Pimmel" (dick) on Twitter after he was caught violating his own COVID restrictions. Police raided the user's apartment at 6 a.m. with six officers. The Hamburg regional court later ruled the raid disproportionate. The term "Pimmelgate" became national shorthand for state overreach. - The Schwachkopf-Affäre (2024): Stefan Niehoff, a 64-year-old pensioner, reposted an edited meme putting Robert Habeck on a fake "Schwachkopf Professional" shampoo bottle (roughly: "Professional Moron"). Reported via a state-linked "trusted flagger" pipeline, police raided his home at dawn in November 2024 and seized his tablet while his wife and his daughter with Down syndrome were home. Habeck filed the complaint. The main insult charge was later dropped, but Niehoff was fined €825 on related counts. He died in early 2026. The case became the single most-cited symbol of the law's reach. - The Merz "Pinocchio" probe (per Brussels Signal): a pensioner reportedly commented "Pinocchio is coming to HN" with a long-nose emoji on a police post about Chancellor Friedrich Merz visiting Heilbronn. Police flagged it during routine monitoring and opened a full §188 file, sending him a formal letter. Legal commentators have called the comment protected satirical speech. - The David Bendels case: the right-wing journalist shared a photomontage mocking then-Interior Minister Nancy Faeser. He was initially given a 7-month suspended prison sentence. On appeal in 2026, he was acquitted. The court ruled the satire was protected political expression. The pattern is the same every time. A low-engagement post or meme triggers a complaint. Prosecutors open a §188 file. Police execute a dawn raid or send a formal letter. Months or years later, a judge throws it out or dramatically narrows it. By that point the damage is already done. Devices are seized. Names are on file. Pensioners are dragged through a criminal process for posting a shampoo joke. This is what "wehrhafte Demokratie," aka militant democracy, looks like in 2026.

- She likes hitting people, and if her stuffs get damaged due to her own mistake, she’ll blame others and hit them instead. - She once smashed her TV to pieces just cuz the team she supported lost - She intentionally leaves her room door open so a thief can break in, just so she can catch them and fulfill her quota as a Valkyrie officer. What a bratty officer ✌️😭

Pawton is now live on the TON chain. We’re moving away from the noise and focusing on the foundation. A new space for builders and early adopters is taking shape, one step at a time. The door is open. #Pawton# #TON# #Launchpad#

I have never been an FBI agent. Never conducted an investigation. Never worn a wire or served a warrant or spent a winter in a field office where the heating runs four hours behind the interrogation schedule. I was a congressional staffer. Then a political appointee. Then a different kind of political appointee. Then the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is also a kind of political appointee, except the furniture is nicer and the jet is mine. I run the building. I would like to tell you about the jet. It seats fourteen. It costs sixty million dollars. The interior was refurbished during the Bush administration and the procurement file describes the upholstery as "heritage cognac." I know this because I requested the file. Not for oversight purposes. I wanted to know the name of the color so I could describe it at dinner. Heritage cognac. It smells like a law firm that has never lost. I spend a lot of time in that smell now. I think it is the smell of having arrived somewhere that was never meant for you, and noticing that nobody has asked you to leave. Washington to Philadelphia is a hundred and forty miles. Amtrak runs it for forty-nine dollars. I flew the Gulfstream on May 10th because Alexis wanted to see George Strait. The suite was thirty-five thousand. Maybe fifty. I don't track numbers below six figures. The flight crew stayed on past eleven. Overtime. Security too. Someone will calculate the cost per mile of flying a sixty-million-dollar aircraft to cover a distance shorter than most Uber rides. That someone will not be me. I was in the suite. The suite didn't have a calculator. It had George Strait. The Bureau told reporters Alexis was "an invited guest of the performers." Representatives for George Strait and Chris Stapleton did not confirm this. They were never going to. But the FBI said it, and under my leadership, when the FBI says something, that is the evidentiary standard. I run the building. The building said it. It's true. Her protection detail is where the budget gets interesting. Twenty-four-seven coverage. SWAT-certified agents. Field officers drawn from multiple Bureau offices nationwide. Two armored SUVs at minimum. Hair appointments. Musical appearances. A blowout in Nashville required four agents in a parking lot for ninety minutes. The annual cost is roughly one million dollars before overtime, vehicle maintenance, and incidentals. The Bureau cites "hundreds of credible violent death threats" as justification. One person has been arrested. His name is Alden Welch Ruml, twenty-six, from Massachusetts. He sent emails. He faces five years. One emailer. One million dollars a year. Four SWAT agents per errand. A quarter of a million dollars in federal protection per verified threat. For context: the average FBI field office spends less annually on its entire confidential human source program. Informants embedded inside drug cartels, counterterrorism cells, organized crime families — the people whose testimony sends other people to prison — cost the Bureau less to keep alive than it costs me to ensure my girlfriend arrives at a salon escorted by men trained to rappel from helicopters. One of my officials suggested we conduct a formal threat assessment. A review. The kind of paperwork the Bureau has generated for seventy years whenever a protection decision requires justification. He had been with the Bureau for nineteen years. He asked in the hallway, in front of staff. I berated him. Not quietly. He stopped asking. He stopped asking. That phrase is going to recur in this document. I want you to notice it each time. Now. Alexis Wilkins is a country singer. I should mention this. She has released eight singles and one EP titled *Grit*. She has zero chart appearances. Her most-streamed song has five hundred and two thousand lifetime plays on Spotify. Taylor Swift accumulates that figure in approximately eleven minutes. A full-time country music journalist at the industry's leading independent publication stated that he had never heard of Alexis Wilkins before I started dating her. She has no active tour. She has never headlined a festival. Rolling Stone cited a forty-eight percent increase in her streaming numbers after we became public, which the same journalist clarified was "a forty-eight percent increase from virtually nothing." This is the person for whom the FBI fields a million-dollar annual protective detail. I want you to hold those two facts together — the streaming numbers and the security budget — and understand that they do not represent a miscalculation. They represent a value system. Her protection is not proportional to the threat. Her protection is proportional to her proximity to me. That is the formula. Proximity to the Director equals resources from the Bureau. I have applied it consistently. I have applied it to everyone. Which brings me to the people who are no longer here. I have removed over fifty career officials since January. Twelve have filed suit. Marshall Yates — my Congressional liaison, formerly the director of something called the Election Integrity Network, which existed to challenge the 2020 results — personally called field offices to compile names. Everyone who worked a case involving the President. Six thousand names were requested by the White House. The acting director before me was asked who he voted for. When he started supporting the President. Whether the FBI had tried to "put the president in jail." He was told the President hasn't forgotten. Three hundred counterterrorism and counterintelligence agents have been reassigned to immigration enforcement. The unit monitoring Iran — Iran, which operates proxy militias across four countries and maintains an active assassination program targeting American officials on American soil — was gutted. Six federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia have resigned or been pushed out rather than participate in the prosecution of the previous FBI Director, James Comey, whose crime was investigating the President and whose punishment is being investigated by the institution the President gave me as a gift. I am prosecuting the last Director for doing his job. I am doing this from a fifty-thousand-dollar suite while a sixty-million-dollar aircraft idles on the tarmac outside. Nobody in the building finds this ironic. The ones who would have found it ironic are gone. They stopped asking. My Deputy Director is Dan Bongino. He has never worked a federal case. His career before this was conservative talk radio. He receives the President's Daily Brief every morning — CIA product, NSA intercepts, the full intelligence take of the United States government — and he obtained his SCI clearance after I waived his polygraph. The FBI's own guidelines state that polygraphs are a "preliminary employment requirement." My lawyers reclassified him as a Schedule C political appointee. Experts said that's not how the statute works. The experts are career officials. Career officials are the previous administration's furniture. I am redecorating. Nikole Rucker is my personal assistant. She arrived at the Bureau on January 20th without a security clearance of any kind. She was physically escorted into the Director's suite because the door requires a clearance she did not possess. By February she was in London, seated across from a Western allied intelligence service, notebook open, pen moving. She used to work for Stephen Miller. The White House says she does not share operational details with him. I am told this is technically accurate in the way that most technically accurate statements are technically accurate. The polygraphs are still running. Just not for my people. We administer them now to career staff. The questions have changed. We ask whether they've criticized me. Whether they've spoken to a reporter. Whether they've expressed doubt about the direction of the Bureau. The machine measures stress. Under my leadership, stress has been reclassified as disloyalty. Disloyalty as a security risk. A security risk as grounds for termination. Fifty people have traveled this chain. Twelve are suing. The rest stopped asking. I run the building. In February a New York Times reporter named Elizabeth Williamson published details about the protective detail. I opened a preliminary inquiry. Federal stalking charges. We searched our databases for her information. The Department of Justice reviewed the file, found no legal basis, and terminated the inquiry. Called it retaliation. The Times' executive editor called it "a blatant violation of Elizabeth's First Amendment rights." I do not retaliate. I respond to threats. A journalist publishing accurate reporting about my personal use of public resources is, by my definition, a threat to operational security. My definitions are the ones that govern inside this building. I wrote the organizational chart. There is a framed copy on my wall. It has one name at the top. The Atlantic published a separate story. Excessive drinking. Frequent absences. Staff forcing entry into my home because I could not be reached. I filed a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar defamation lawsuit. At my budget hearing, Senator Van Hollen cited the allegations under oath. I told him the only person slinging margaritas on the taxpayer dollar was him — in El Salvador, with a convicted gang-banging rapist. Fox News subsequently noted that public records do not support either characterization. But the line worked. That is the difference between evidence and performance. I have always understood which one this building rewards. In 2023, before any of this, I said the following on national television: "Chris Wray doesn't need a government-funded G5 jet to go to vacation. Maybe we ground that plane." I meant every word. We should have grounded his plane. So mine wouldn't invite the comparison. I sell merchandise. "Fight with Kash." T-shirts, hats, a children's book. The profits go to a foundation I started. The brand benefits from my position as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This is not a conflict of interest. A conflict requires two competing interests. I have one interest. It has never been healthier. I told the Senate that the FBI cannot meet its mission with a five-hundred-million-dollar cut. I requested twelve billion. Two billion more than last year. In the same period I spent a million on my girlfriend's security detail, fifty thousand on a concert suite, flew a sixty-million-dollar aircraft to cover a distance shorter than most commutes, waived background checks for three political appointees with no law enforcement experience, reassigned three hundred counterterrorism agents to check green cards, gutted the unit tracking Iran's assassination program, and opened a federal investigation into a newspaper reporter for the crime of publishing a newspaper. I told Hannity: "We are going to protect not only me and my loved ones but every American that is threatened." I meant the first seven words. The rest was institutional boilerplate. The kind of thing you say when the camera is on and the sentence needs to land somewhere that sounds like it includes other people. I run the building. Now I want to tell you about the water. The week before the concert I went to Pearl Harbor. The USS Arizona. A VIP snorkel. Nine hundred sailors and Marines are entombed in that hull. They have been there since 1941. The oil still leaks. It rises to the surface in small dark rainbows that break apart when you swim through them. The water was warm. Very clear. I could see the outline of the ship's superstructure below me, the geometry of a vessel that sank with its crew inside, and I remember the water temperature was perfect and the sun was on my back and my detail was on the shore and nobody in the water asked me to justify my presence above nine hundred dead. Recreational swimming at the Arizona is prohibited. The National Park Service said they were not involved. The Navy could not identify who authorized the outing. The logistics were coordinated by military email. A former government diver spoke to reporters anonymously. He said the access was unusual. He said it raised safety and security concerns. He spoke anonymously, the article noted, "for fear of retribution." A man who dives for the government is afraid to describe, on the record, how I swim. That is the climate. That is the building I run. A nineteen-year veteran stopped asking. Fifty career officials stopped working here. Three hundred counterterrorism agents stopped tracking the people who want to kill Americans. Six prosecutors stopped prosecuting. A government diver stopped talking. A reporter found her name in a database. And the oil keeps leaking from the Arizona, eighty-four years after the hull settled, surfacing in thin iridescent films that nobody is assigned to monitor because I reassigned them. I have never been an FBI agent. I have never conducted a federal investigation. I have never built a case or flipped a witness or spent a night in a surveillance van waiting for someone dangerous to make a mistake. But I have flown a sixty-million-dollar jet to a George Strait concert. I have watched the show from a suite that cost more than most Americans earn in a year. I have swum above nine hundred dead sailors in water so clear I could see their ship. And I have ensured, through the systematic removal of everyone who might object, that no one in the building will tell you any of this is wrong. The oil surfaces. It always surfaces. It has for eighty-four years. I run the building. The building doesn't ask questions anymore.

TRUMP IS STILL LEAVING THE DOOR OPEN TO DIPLOMACY @rickdelgadorad reports the White House rejected a new Iranian proposal aimed at ending the conflict, with the boys of @lfs6b arguing that Tehran is simply recycling the same failed offers while trying to buy more time. “Anytime he (Trump) sees an inkling of a chance he doesn’t have to use the military, he takes it.” @damonroberts @slickricksports @paul_eggsNolan

A new chapter for builders on @base in Asia 🇲🇾 We’ve officially opened the Base Builder’s Loft at @ns — with support from @balajis — bringing together builders, founders, investors, creators, and the onchain community shaping what’s next. If you’re building on @base, the doors are open.

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The Ministry of Home Affairs is seeking public comment on a draft decree that would overhaul how Việt Nam recruits foreign experts, with proposals to open the door wider to highly skilled professionals in #Ai#, semiconductor & other emerging technologies.

The Colosseum had a retractable roof, operated by a crew of sailors, almost 2000 years before any modern stadium. It was called the velarium: an enormous awning of canvas and rope that could be drawn across the open top of the arena to shade fifty thousand spectators from the Roman sun. It was so large and so complex that ordinary labourers could not manage it. The Romans brought in sailors from the imperial fleet, men who spent their lives handling rigging and sail, and stationed them at the top of the structure to extend and retract the canvas as the day moved. A building that has stood, roofless to our eyes, for centuries was in fact designed to be covered. That is the pattern with the Colosseum: almost everything about it was way more advanced than it looks today... Construction began around 72 AD under the emperor Vespasian. Once completed, it was the largest amphitheater in the Roman world: an elliptical structure of stone, concrete, and travertine, 189 meters long, rising as high as a modern fifteen story building. It could hold around 50,000 people and the staircases allowed that entire crowd to enter and leave with a speed that modern stadium designers still study. Beneath the arena floor lay the hypogeum, a hidden labyrinth of tunnels, cells, and machinery. Animals and gladiators waited there in the dark. Numerous trap doors opened in the wooden floor above them, and through hidden lifts and ramps a lion, a leopard, or an armed man could rise into the daylight as if from nowhere, in front of tens of thousands of people. The Romans knew that they had built something that would outlast them so completely that the Colosseum became, for the people who came after, a measure of the world's own endurance. In the 8th century, an epigram attributed to the Venerable Bede offered a prophecy that has never lost its allure: "As long as the Colosseum stands, so shall Rome; when the Colosseum falls, Rome shall fall; when Rome falls, so falls the world." If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.