Rosaline Reviews

So, in terrible news, Trump's trying to pull some strings to pass this massive internet censorship bill, featuring all the kinds of internet censorship we're terrified of, including mandatory ID for accessing basically any website, specifically to crush state regulation of AI, because apparently this man will always see the moral bottom of the barrel and start digging.

6/14/2026

Pierre-Jules Boulanger

Paris fell on a Tuesday. By Wednesday, German officers were already walking the factory floor at Citroën. Their orders were simple: France's greatest automobile manufacturer would now build trucks for the Wehrmacht. Supply vehicles. Military transports. The mechanical backbone of Nazi occupation. Pierre-Jules Boulanger, the 55-year-old chairman who had spent his career building cars for French families, now faced a choice that would define everything. Refuse — and the Germans would shoot him, install someone cooperative, and build the trucks anyway. Comply fully — and he would be personally responsible for vehicles carrying soldiers to kill Allied forces, supplies sustaining the occupation, machinery enabling conquest. He refused both options. Instead, he gathered his engineers late one evening and said something they would never forget: "Production must appear respectable to the eye. But never to the heart."

The vehicle the Germans wanted was the Citroën T45 — a powerful, heavy-duty truck perfectly suited for military logistics. Reliable engine. Solid construction. Exactly what the Wehrmacht needed to keep its war machine rolling across Europe. Boulanger's engineers studied every component, looking for a vulnerability so small it would be invisible at inspection, yet catastrophic enough to matter in the field. They found it in the most ordinary place imaginable. The dipstick. That thin metal rod you pull from an engine to check the oil level — the one with a simple notch marking "full." Every German mechanic, following standard maintenance protocol, would pull it out, check the level, add oil if needed, and move on. Boulanger's engineers made one quiet adjustment. They moved the "full" notch. Not dramatically — that would be caught immediately. Just enough. A small filing. A modest repositioning. When a German mechanic checked the oil and the dipstick read full, the engine would actually be running low. Not catastrophically empty. Not enough to trigger an immediate warning. Just enough to create chronic, invisible stress on the engine's most critical components. Under normal use, nothing obvious would happen. But under sustained military operation — long supply runs, heavy loads, demanding terrain — the engine would begin destroying itself from the inside. Heat. Friction. Accelerating wear on parts designed to float in a film of oil that was never quite there. And then, eventually, on some road far from any factory inspector, the engine would seize. Every truck that left the Citroën facility passed German quality inspection perfectly. Test drives were smooth. Oil levels appeared correct. Vehicles were approved, signed off, shipped to Wehrmacht units across occupied Europe. The German mechanics who serviced them were doing everything right. They checked the oil. They topped it off when the dipstick said to. They followed every protocol. The dipstick told them everything was fine. The dipstick was lying.

Weeks later, reports began filtering back through Wehrmacht supply chains. Citroën trucks were developing unusual engine problems. Vehicles were seizing during operations. Supply convoys were breaking down at inexplicable rates. Commanders blamed driver error, poor roads, excessive loads. No one suspected the dipstick, because every truck from that factory had the same dipstick. There was no correctly calibrated reference to compare it against. The sabotage was, in the most elegant sense, self-concealing. Meanwhile, Boulanger ran a parallel campaign of productive-looking paralysis. Workers were instructed to maintain schedules — but never exceed them. No urgency. No efficiency gains. If a German officer demanded faster output, Boulanger would nod thoughtfully and cite material shortages, equipment maintenance, worker fatigue. Always polite. Always documented. Always just plausible enough. The frustration in German command was visible. Why was Citroën slower than other factories? Why were their trucks underperforming in the field? They suspected resistance. They could never prove it.

In 1944, French Resistance fighters raided Gestapo headquarters in Paris and discovered something chilling — a detailed blacklist of French civilians to be arrested and executed upon Allied invasion. Pierre-Jules Boulanger's name was on it. The Nazis had never found the tampered dipstick. They had never proved deliberate sabotage. But they knew something was wrong at Citroën, and they knew who was responsible. They were right. They were just too late. When Allied forces liberated France that same year, Boulanger didn't seek recognition or medals. He went back to his drafting table. His first post-war project became one of the most beloved vehicles in automotive history — the Citroën 2CV. A simple, honest car for ordinary French families. Cheap to run, impossible to break, designed to carry four people and fifty kilograms of potatoes across rural France on almost no fuel at all. Nearly seven million were built over four decades. The same engineers who had quietly dismantled a military machine with a filed notch on a piece of metal were now building the car that helped rebuild a nation.

it is our differences which make us dearer to one another

it is never too late to start loving

the enemy is not the foreigner, but the ones who tell you to hate the foreigner

everyone should have food, shelter, and work

everything is a yin and yang metaphor if you try hard enough

Y'know, I've largely moved on beyond pointing out and lamenting at how openly corrupt the Trump administration is, but holy shit the Trump administration is so unbelievably corrupt.

She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.

Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.

Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.

The record label will never put her name on the album.

Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.

The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.

Carol could do it on the first try.

She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.

But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.

That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.

She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.

Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.

She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.

The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.

For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.

Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.

And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.

But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.

Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.

i work with unhoused people fleeing domestic violence, and i have a client rn whose driver's license expired in 2024, and she needs a new id to apply for apartments. ok, cool. problem is, she lost all her documents due to the domestic violence

so we call the dmv. dmv needs a birth certificate. like i said, she lost her birth certificate. she needs a new one. her birth certificate is from out of state

we look up how to get a new birth certificate. the birth certificate needs an id to order it. cool cool cool

ok then what about secondary options? well, she needs two secondary sources of identification to order a replacement birth certificate, and she only has one, because for everything else she needs an id. fishing license? need an id. fucking park pass? id. she could have her 18+ child use their birth certificate to vouch for her, except her abuser won't let her talk to her children, so that's a no go

ultimately we land on social security card. this is where we're at in the process rn. ofc she doesn't have her ss card, so we need to order that. social security also requires an id to request a new card, but they'll take a health insurance card with a picture attached (god fucking bless them). she has medicaid but doesn't have a physical copy of the card, so we have to figure out how to get that. then once we do that we have to upload it to the social security website, and if that doesn't work, we have to, god forbid, call the social security office (takes literal hours) and then make an appointment. she doesn't have transportation or cell service, so we would have to figure out a way to coordinate me getting her to the appointment in order to present the document

then we wait 10+ days for the replacement, that has to be mailed to me bc she is unhoused and doesn't have an address

then we need to submit her request for a new birth certificate, which we have to figure out how to pay for, bc it is not free. they're at least a month behind on requests, btw, so we are probably looking at may at the earliest for that to arrive

then we need to take the birth certificate to the dmv

dmv also requires two pieces of mail not from a po box. she doesn't have an address, she is unhoused. she can use the homeless shelter in town, but we will need to mail her stuff there and have her receive it first, and also then the homeless shelter address will now be on her new id, which landlords will recognize and may discriminate against her for

during all of this she is sleeping in a garage. it was negative one degrees this morning. also, forgot to mention, she is terminally ill. some days i legitimately don't know if she lived through the night. every day is a toss up

the absolute soonest she will have an id is probably late may. forget voter registration--most rentals won't let her apply without it. she won't be offered section 8 housing without it. she can't apply for ssdi without it. she is blocked at literally every corner without it, and the absolute soonest she can get it is late may. the dmv literally has her old card on file, and she knows the number by heart, but it doesn't matter. it doesn't count if it's expired, as if she's somehow become someone new

and that's all with the help of someone whose job it is to do this shit. imagine if she didn't have a caseworker. she has a ten year old donated iphone that only works on wifi, she can't even do her own research bc she doesn't have internet half the time. how the hell is she supposed to get anything done on her own?