Let us begin with continuations in the war against the public receiving accurate, unbiased information. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was told it would receive zero support from the U.S. government, in the same veins of executive orders that proclaim that the executive has the real power of the purse and Congressional appropriations and their amounts mean nothing to his whims. Like other such orders, the actual validity and power of the executive to do this is suspect at best and nonexistent in reality. And, of course, there's always a group of ghouls ready to step in and take over - A spokesmodel for the administration said the conservative propaganda network OAN would take over providing content for Voice of America broadcasts. Swift backlash about the degraded quality and obvious partisan slant of OAN followed from those who actually understand and know what Voice of America broadcasts were supposed to do.

A federal judge granted an injunction against the current administration's intent to zero out the funding of the Institute for Museum and Library Services. With the news, coming just a little after the person currently in charge of IMLS indicated he wanted libraries to be an essential part of propaganda efforts, and strongly suggesting that the people suing would win their case on the merits, there is now flux on funding, but also, a need to have Congresscritters continue to insist upon a budget that contains funds for IMLS in fiscal year 2026.

The administrator dismissed the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, by e-mail after the injunctions were announced, because of pressure against her by people who think that a Black woman is completely unqualified to do anything that might have white people subordinate to her, and possibly in petty revenge for being told no that he couldn't simply zero out the IMLS budget. When questioned on the matter, a spokesmodel for the executive proclaimed that Dr. Hayden was involved in unacceptable DEI and in promoting harmful materials to children, proving that the spokesmodel and her bosses have zero idea of what the Library of Congress actually does.

The Copyright Office dropped a pre-print of a report that excoriated LLMs and is poised to rule that the widespread copyright violation and stealing of copyrighted works involved in creating datasets for LLMs are, in fact, widespread copyright violations and not simply the cost of doing business. Almost immediately after, the administration dismissed the Register of Copyrights, which could be merely convenient timing or could also be a revenge firing for the Copyright Office telling all the techbros that they do have to respect the copyright law and the copyrights of the people they're stealing from.

Persons appointed by the Executive who claim to be the new Librarian of Congress and Register of Copyrights were turned away by the actual interim Librarian of Congress and Register of Copyrights and the staff of the Library of Congress. Because those people who were supposedly appointed are very likely not to be the people in the job according to statute.

All of these actions, however, are things that the Congress could possibly assert that it, nor the Executive, have exclusive or primary control over, and therefore tell the Executive to pound sand. This, however, requires a Congress that actually wants to maintain its independence, rather than functioning as the Duma of the United States.

( As usual, plenty of US Politics, but many other objects as well )

Going out for this post, the legacy of Dave Brubeck is in good music, yes, but also in a staunch refusal to allow segregation to break up his groups or to prevent Black people from enjoying jazz wherever in the venue they wanted to. (Older piece, but also, lots of people say May 4th, or 5/4 in the US nomenclature, is Dave Brubeck day, based on his iconic Take Five.)

A takedown of the Tesla Cybertruck that focuses entirely on how much it fails at being a truck, doing truck tasks, and fostering a healthy truck culture.

And Studio Ghibli releasing hundreds of images form their films for people to use within the boundaries of common sense and for individuals to further enjoy the films. Which is lovely, because of the lushness of the images in the films, but also because this is a continual shot against people using plagiarism machines to replicate their style (poorly.) and others who do not find these films worthwhile on their own

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)