Butterfly Affect

As a CSA victim myself, I don’t think adults should be fucking children. I just don’t think there should be any demographic of people who can be used as an excuse to kill or even harm anyone else by existing, because the specter of the pedophile is actively used by white supremacists and transmisogynists as an excuse to kill and harm Black and Transfemme people, CSA victims, and cause actual CSA prevention tools/centers to be unable to help victims because they must wade through a sea of useless and hyperbolic reports. I’m a staunch abolitionist and believe every person has the right to bodily autonomy including the right to not be killed or harmed unless EVERY POSSIBLE OTHER METHOD OF REPARATION AND RECONCILIATION HAS FAILED. Unless it is an act of self defense or an individual, group, or organization refuses to stop actively harming others where violence has become the only answer, nobody should be being killed, harmed, or exiled in the name of a false premise of “justice” as a first, second, third, or anything but last responses.

None of us are free until all of us are free, including those we hate, those we fear, those we detest. As long as there is a way to make any demographic of people into a monster who anything can be done to, you, too, can be named as that monster and have anything done to you.

Speaking as someone who has actually had multiple people threaten them with lynching, who’s been falsely accused of everything under the sun to justify extrajudicial “justice” within communities, who has been functionally enslaved in the current age and heard and shared the stories of others who have been as well:

Hello! I was asked by @transjohnnnny to set up a fundraiser to help them raise money to improve the conditions they're currently facing. John and Ciara live with 38 other LBGTQIA refugees and have been facing discrimination, threats of transphobic and homophobic violence; along with worsening conditions thanks to a lack of shelter, clean water and food. Please donate what you can and if you're not able too reblog! They desperately need the help, any money given to this campaign will be used to buy food, tents and other supplies. Again if you're not able to donate please reblog and share!

linked tree (includes options to donate to Ghanaian projects)

Already-inadequate social safety nets are already being dismantled and I think the cultural environment is going to become more and more brutal to disabled people.

We've seen some of this already obviously. The socially-acceptable, earnest explanations that the r slur is okay now because everyone's saying it, the refusal to do literally anything to protect disabled people from covid, the austerity so many governments are enforcing on the most vulnerable members of their populations.

Politics and culture are in lockstep on the insistence that disabled people are expendable. I think this has already changed the social landscape dramatically and it's only accelerating.

As the number of people too disabled to work surges from the longer-term effects of an unusually disabling virus, as work becomes increasingly brutal and underpaid (your actual income number MAY be the same, but you can't buy as much food or housing with it, and new hires are being paid even less), as social services continue to be gutted, people who care for disabled people are going to increasingly see us as burdens and see our survival as incompatible with their own.

If you aren't yet disabled, PLEASE stand up for us and find ways to organize additional support instead of just dumping your disabled loved ones on the street to die.

"I'd never do that!" Good!! Hold on to that!!Bc the Overton window will shift your opinions and politics if you let it.

So many people who were righteously angry five years ago about governments suggesting killing disabled people was an acceptable price to keep the economy running, are now repeating those same conservative party lines almost word for word and thinking it's different because they're used to it now.

It's going to become increasingly common to abandon disabled people. It's going to be described as setting boundaries and protecting your peace and prioritizing reciprocity.

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.

Look at these pictures. How long will this continue? Yesterday I narrowly escaped death, and today a residential block near my home was targeted, and we miraculously survived again. How long will this silence last? It will kill me and my family. Please help me. Donate to us. Donate to my nephew to save him from death and get him the surgery he needs. I'm afraid if anything happens to me, no one will be able to save my nephew. Please, please donate before we die. Donate! 😭💔

Carolina Milanesi, an independent technology analyst, said Google is trying to make its cash cow business — search — richer and more personalized, and it will make shopping easier. But there is a risk that users may have fewer choices about what to click. "Right now it's: I ask a question, I get a bunch of answers and I feel that I'm in control as to which answer I take, or if I'm looking for something, which product I'm going to end up buying. That is going to be less so going forward," she said. Milanesi envisions AI-enabled search and agents proposing products to consumers — perhaps even those they have requested — but with less clarity or choice around where it's coming from. "If you're going to say: 'I want a pair of Jordans, go find them,' you're not necessarily sure what steps have been taken and whether the AI has used a source or a store that was paid for and therefore came up in the search results," she said, "or if AI actually went and did their due diligence and picked the best for me as a customer."

And here's one from Time magazine (May 20, 2026):

While Google already has “AI Mode,” the company will now power the whole search bar through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model.  Instead of the classic list of blue links, Google Search will now also generate a custom page with an AI-generated summary of what you’re searching about, which will then trigger a conversation with AI Mode on the main page, allowing users to ask follow-up questions—similar to the kind of layout you would see when opening ChatGPT.

And a little more from Time's article on how this may affect the websites that we are trying to search for: