Another photo from the antifascist Carnaval in Lausanne. This one shows a person wearing a lucha libre masks, staring at the crowd and smoke

This! April 202611 min read

[A monthly link list of recommended articles, videos, podcasts, photos, toots … you name it]

an image from my Pixelfed (because, fuck instagram), shows a beautiful magpie on an ugly roof next to a hideous metal pipe
an image from my Pixelfed (because, fuck instagram), shows a beaver swimming upstream in a river next to reflections of reeds glimmering in the water
an image from my Pixelfed (because, fuck instagram), shows two people wearing spy masks in front of graffiti wall that reads


[Videos]

The Secret Plan to Cover the World in Herbicide – Find the article bellow.

Here Where We Live Is Our Country: Molly Crabapple w/ Naomi Klein – the book is on my list.


[Music]

Inferno, by Boards of Canada – Can’t wait for May 29, hope to still be alive by then.

Massive Attack / Tom Waits – Boots on the Ground

Boards of Canada Tape 05 emergency reactionalysis – I just love their excitement. They also recently analyzed Tomorrow’s Harvest.

Boards of Canada – Tape 05 – Boah.


[Podcasts]

Legacies of Colonialism in Public Health [public health is dead] – “Public health has been used as a tool of empire for centuries. Keeping settlers healthy enough to maintain colonial control over land, resources, and capital is a part of public health’s history. It’s also part of its present.” Public health will always be a tool of empire under the current system, capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal etc. But public health will also be needed under the coming system.

Lifemaking in the Margins of Urban Space w/ Kate Brown | The Death Panel [.soundcloud] – “Beatrice speaks with Kate Brown about the history of mutual aid agriculture projects in the US and Europe after the enclosure of the commons, how autonomous community agriculture has historically been met with expulsion or co-optation by the state, and her book Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City.” I learned a lot about the history of urban gardens and allotments. Does not improve my feelings for gardening on one.


[Toot Threads]


[Pandemic Roundup]

Covid: April 30, 2026
Covid: April 16, 2026
Covid: April 9, 2026
Covid: April 2, 2026


[The Must Read[s] This Month]

Is AI the greatest art heist in history? | Molly Crabapple [guardian] – “Artists too are fighting for a way of life. And if we are too disorganised to triumph, that will be everyone’s loss. AI companies’ inappropriate scraping may have started with the work of illustrators like me, but it has grown to encompass everything else. It extends to the billions of dollars that these companies squander each year, to the carbon they burn, to the rare minerals in their chips, to the land on which their data centres sit, to culture, education, sanity and our very imaginations.” AI will try to make us redundant. If we don’t make it redundant first.

Finding the Cattle Queen | Rachel Ossip [n+1] – “The poster seems to have struck a chord with the feminists, and it continued to pop up at protests. Sheila Paige’s short documentary Testing, Testing How Do You Do? (1969), filmed at the following year’s pageant protest, opens with a long pan down the length of the poster. It shows up again a few years later, in 1971, at the first Women’s Liberation Demonstration in London, edited with paint to read “break the dull mis-steak habit.”” Quite the twisted tale from sexist advert to feminist icon.


[Articles English]

XOXO Archive – “XOXO was an experimental festival for independent artists and creators from the internet.” Was *snif. Sad to have never attended in person.

We Are Bombarding America’s Forests With Roundup [motherjones] – “I then show him a 2020 EPA report that concluded glyphosate harms 93 percent of endangered species and 96 percent of the critical habitat they rely on—creatures including the Sierra Nevada red fox, gray wolf, and spotted owl, all protected in Lassen. Nickerson says he’s never seen the report. Fair enough, but do its findings make him think twice about using Roundup?” Trump and his asshole cronies hellbent on killing us all.

We need masks in healthcare. Now. [the sick times] – “I find it challenging to put my faith in healthcare workers to give me accurate and reliable medical advice when they are choosing to not protect themselves or their patients. Many healthcare workers do not understand how COVID-19 is spread or that many infections are asymptomatic. On average, it takes 14 to 17 years for new medical knowledge to become common practice. In the meantime, patients are left on our own to educate the experts we are expected to trust, on top of the power imbalance.” This, so much this. And then this again. WTF is wrong with a medical system that forces the most vulnerable to beg their doctors to wear masks, and if they agree they only wear shitty ones?! Everything is wrong!?

Palantir’s social media manifesto is a blueprint for technofascism [thenerve] – “The most troubling part is that this vision is not hypothetical. Palantir and its political allies have already partly implemented it. Predictive policing tools shape how law enforcement allocates resources. Immigration systems rely on AI to track and categorise individuals. Military operations increasingly depend on real-time data fusion platforms and AI is used to select targets for air strikes. Palantir’s software is a central part of this ecosystem. It’s used by the US government and Israel, but also by law enforcement in the EU and UK, and in Britain’s NHS. When the company describes a world organised around these capabilities, it is not imagining the future: it is describing the present, just extended and intensified. The contracts are signed. People have been detained. Bombs have fallen.” I can only hope that we can somehow stop this bullshit. But it does not seem likely.

“We Don’t Know Most Things”: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein on Curiosity and the Cosmos [organizingmythoughts] – “Elon Musk is not some kind of technical genius. If he’s good at anything, it’s surrounding himself with people who are good enough at technical stuff to carry him along. In that sense, he is simply an inferior villain to a morally bankrupt J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was actually technically highly proficient. In both cases, they had substantial social and economic capital, which made it easier for them to succeed in their endeavors. But even if someone wants to debate me about Musk’s scientific skill set, the main point is that being really good at something doesn’t make you a really good person, or a person with good values, or a person with the nerve to live those values.” Chanda Prescod-Weinstein seems to have written an interesting book for anyone who wonders how science can become ethics-driven AND exiting again.

When (and Why) Exactly Did Elon Musk Make His Hard Turn to the Right? [lithub] – “In the Western tradition, Haraway observed, “the relation between organism and machine has been a border war.” For Muskism, this border war had to be waged in such a way as to erase some lines while hardening others. Humanity should merge with the machine—so long as it remained segmented by gender, race, and class. Call it cyborg conservatism.” A tl;dr summary of the Slobodian/Tarnoff book Musiksm can also be found here: pluralistic.

Steven Pinker Doesn’t Know Anything About Marxism [current affairs] – “There’s also a larger issue here, beyond the particular case of Karl Marx. For a long time, establishment-beloved centrist intellectuals like Pinker have been able to coast along, confidently assured of the truth of their self-evident principles and often lavishly funded by the grateful rich. In the increasingly dark political time in which we live, that is no longer going to cut it.” Is Pinker the epitome of the radicalized centrist cuddling with fascists? A veritable showpiece, indeed.

How Covid Quietly Rewires The Brain [asrn] – “The picture that emerged was of a slow shift playing out beneath the surface of entire populations: a rise in cognitive problems, subtle declines in functional capacity, and lost independence. And although the medical implications are troubling enough, the economic ones are beginning to register too. If Covid is quietly accelerating cognitive aging or impairing decision-making in working-age adults, the consequences will ripple through workplaces and health systems for years.” Hate to say, i told you so. But i did.

I developed Long COVID while practicing medicine. The system had no place for me. [the sick times] – “For months, I had been managing symptoms I attributed to stress and burnout from the pandemic’s first wave. But at that moment in 2020, I understood that I had become the kind of doctor for whom our medical field has no infrastructure.” Imagine that. You worked you ass off for a system that then drops you as soon as you would need its support.

Facebook and Instagram Tighten Censorship Rules for Saying “Antifa” – “Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta changed its speech rules to add new restrictions around posts including the word “antifa,” according to documents reviewed by The Intercept.” Oh do fuck off, Zuck

Select all images with doctors [b3ta] – Almost impossible to solve.

Austerity creates fascism [pluralistic] – “Fascists thrive in these conditions. Fascists come to power by mobilizing grievances. By choosing a scapegoat, fascists can create support from people who are justifiably furious that the services they rely on have collapsed. So when you can’t get shelter, or health care, or elder care, or child care, or an education for your kids, you become a mark for a fascist grifter with a story about “undeserving migrants”; who’ve taken the benefits that should rightly accrue to ‘deserving natives’.” Yes, but no one needs to turn fascist. We can’t give them an out.

FBI recovers deleted Signal messages from iPhone notification database [lynnwood times] – “Federal investigators extracted copies of deleted incoming Signal messages from a suspect’s iPhone by accessing Apple’s internal notification storage, even after the encrypted messaging app had been removed and its disappearing messages feature used, according to court testimony in a Texas terrorism prosecution of Antifa militants.” Apple fixed it now, but what a royal fuck up.

Global Climate Report | March 2026 [ncei] – “Tying with 2024, March 2026 was the second-warmest March in the 177-year global record, with a surface temperature 1.31°C (2.36°F) above the 20th-century average. Only March 2025 recorded a higher temperature, surpassing it by just 0.01°C (0.02°F). All March global temperature departures ranking in the top 10 during the period 1850–2026 have occurred since 2015. This month marked the 50th consecutive March with a global temperature departure above the 20th-century average; the last March to rank below the 1901–2000 mean occurred in 1976.” We good.

Stop talking about AI – start talking about techno-fascism [freedom news] – “There can be no compromise with techno-fascism. There is no baby and no bathwater here, as the ‘benefits’ of AI are mostly irrelevant. We are getting techno-fascism as a whole package and it is inadmissibly naïve to think that we can pick and choose and ‘regulate’.” Kill the entire thing. With fire. Is what we should do. But convenience.

Exarcheia: Political Life Suffocated by State Surveillance [unicorn riot] – “Exarcheia has long been home to anti-fascist, anti-authoritarian groups. It is both a political space and also a hub that reveres intellectual atmosphere and authenticity. It has often been coined as the anarchist neighborhood in Athens, with popular discourse reflecting the rebellious character of the area.” Some recent history.


[Articles German/French]

Carnaval antifasciste : encore des violences de l’ultra-gauche – “ON SE FAIT ATTAQUER AU CARNAVAL ANTIFASCISTE DE LAUSANNE??!!!🎭👺” Is a satire warning needed?

Rechts­extreme Hilfs-Sheriffs [republik] – “Die Berner Polizei hat unverpixelte Bilder von mutmasslichen Straftätern an der Gaza-Demo veröffentlicht. Im Zeitalter von Gesichts-Suchmaschinen hat das gravierende Konsequenzen – und verstösst gegen rechts­staatliche Garantien.” This is beyond fucked up. I hate these assholes. Which is why i always timestamp my posts 13:12. Or is that childish?

Trump plant internationalen Anti-Antifa-Gipfel [nk-aktuell] – “Die Trump-Administration plant einen internationalen Gipfel zur Bekämpfung »der Antifa« und anderer linker Gruppen. Das berichtete Reuters am Dienstag unter Berufung auf drei mit der Sache vertraute Quellen. Die Konferenz ist für Juni oder Juli dieses Jahres angesetzt. Sie richtet sich an Regierungsvertreter*innen verschiedener Länder, um Strategien gegen »die Antifa« zu erörtern.” WTF, we already had 86 reasons to hate 47.

Wie der Bund dein digitales Leben seziert [das lamm] – “In der Schweiz ist die totale digitale Überwachung keine Dystopie, sondern seit über zehn Jahren Rechtsnorm. Wie der Staat das Puzzle deiner Metadaten zusammensetzt und wie du dich dagegen wehren kannst.” If only we could do something about this.


[Older articles, still great]

The Peoples Want – “The Peoples Want manifesto brings together the lessons and analyses that we have drawn from the last two decades of struggle and from our exchanges at the four previous internationalist gatherings we’ve organised. It sets out our vision for a revolutionary internationalism for the 21st century.” Another well-meaning manifesto, even if there is no lack of those.

The Psychedelic Rise and Fall of Two Sonoma Communes [sonomamag] – “Experience the days of free living and free love in Sonoma County” I lived so close to these two farms, icons of hippies history, but completely missed them. Feel ashamed now.


R.I.P.

Too many in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, Ukraine and all the other wars.
And i am sure some famous people died as well.


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Header Photo: Antifascist Carnaval in Lausanne

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