The Other McCain

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Vegan Transgender Death Cult Update

Posted on | January 28, 2025 | Comments Off on Vegan Transgender Death Cult Update

Y’all didn’t think I was going to let this story go with just one blog post, did you? How many times in my career am I going to get the chance to use “Vegan Transgender Death Cult” in a headline? In for a dime, in for a dollar — you’re gonna get in-depth coverage, my friends.

The “Zizian” plot continues to become more complicated:

A man accused of murder in California appears to have sought a marriage license with a woman charged in connection with the fatal shooting of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Vermont.
The woman, Teresa Youngblut, 21, of Washington state, faces two weapons charges in connection with the Jan. 20 death of 44-year-old Border Patrol Agent David Maland.
A prosecution motion seeking Youngblut’s detention Monday says she was in frequent contact with someone who is a person of interest in a homicide investigation in Vallejo, California.
Court records show that Maximilian Snyder, 22, was arrested by Vallejo police on Friday. He was charged Monday with murder and has a court appearance scheduled Tuesday in California’s Solano County. An attorney was not listed for Snyder.
In November, individuals identified as Teresa Youngblut and Maximilian Snyder took out a marriage license, according to a records search in Washington state’s King County. . . .
According to the criminal complaint filed in Solano County, Snyder allegedly killed a person with a knife on Jan. 17. The complaint alleges the person, identified as “C.L.,” was a witness to a crime who was “intentionally killed for the purpose of preventing his testimony in a criminal proceeding” or to retaliate for his testimony.
A gofundme.com page for a Curtis Lind mentions he was attacked on his property in Vallejo on Jan. 17 and died.

Curtis Lind made the mistake of renting his property to three members of the Zizian cult — Emma Borhanian, 31, Alexander Jeffrey Leatham, 27, and Suri Dao, 21. All of them were transgender. Leatham goes by the alias “Somnulence ‘Somni’ Logencia.” In November 2022, the trio of Zizians attacked Lind with a samurai sword:

Lind’s family said he had been trying to evict a group a people who hadn’t been paying rent.
His son, Carl Lind, said, “A big part of this problem was this moratorium on rent, COVID. People took advantage of it.”
Patrick McMillan, who lives on the property in a motor home, said after the attack Lind came to him covered in blood.
McMillan said, “He had a samurai sword stuck to his back with about a foot of it sticking out in front, his face cut up all over.”
“After they attacked him he got his gun out and shot two of them, killed one of them. The other one had three shots to the chest,” McMillan said.

Emma Borhanian

Borhanian was killed, Leatham was severely wounded, and both Leatham and Dao were charged not only with attacking Lind, but also with the death of their accomplice, Borhanian. “Lind was set to testify against his alleged assailants as the sole eyewitness in a criminal trial scheduled for April,” so the murder motive was to prevent him from testifying.

Curtis Lind

Based on a post warning “the rationalist community” about the Zizians, “Suri Dao” also made bail, while Leatham/“Somni” is apparently still in custody. Meanwhile, the cult leader, Jack Lasota, a/k/a “Ziz,” was also arrested in connection with the January 2023 murder of Richard Zajko, 72, and his wife, Rita, 69, who were the parents of a Zizian cult member named Michelle “Jamie” Zajko. However, “Ziz”/Lasota was released on bail in June 2023, but not before Maximilian Snyder, a/k/a “Audere,” had tried to raise money for Ziz’s bail. Based on the latest news, then, it appears that the Vermont shooting suspect Youngblut (who identified as “Milo”) was married to Snyder/“Audere,” who is now accused of murdering Curtis Lind. That would be no fewer than five deaths — Borhanian, Lind, Richard and Rita Zajko, and now Border Patrol agent Chris Maland — connected to the Zizian cult.

AI Doomer Cool Kids Club

What must be understood about “Ziz”/Lasota and his followers is that all this craziness originates in the West Coast world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. If you thought this tale was convoluted and confusing so far, just buckle your seatbelts, because we’re about to dive headlong into an abyss of insanity. Ziz attended a workshop sponsored by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and an associated organization, the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR). “In 2000, Eliezer Yudkowsky founded” what was to become MIRI “with the purpose of accelerating the development of artificial intelligence”:

However, Yudkowsky began to be concerned that AI systems developed in the future could become superintelligent and pose risks to humanity, and in 2005 the institute moved to Silicon Valley and began to focus on ways to identify and manage those risks, which were at the time largely ignored by scientists in the field.
Starting in 2006, the Institute organized the Singularity Summit to discuss the future of AI including its risks, initially in cooperation with Stanford University and with funding from Peter Thiel. The San Francisco Chronicle described the first conference as a “Bay Area coming-out party for the tech-inspired philosophy called transhumanism.”

Following so far? Well, because of Yudkowsky’s idea that AI could “pose risks to humanity,” he spun off CFAR to promote “rationality,” as some sort of defense against this risk. In 2016, the New York Times did a feature story about CFAR, and this would have been no more than two or  three years before “Ziz”/Lasota attended a MIRI/CFAR workshop. It would appear that among nerds interested in AI research, being part of “the rationalist community” is like membership in the Cool Kids Club.

What I’ve shared with you so far is the briefest, most superficial summary of MIRI/CFAR that I could devise. This background is important because Lasota/“Ziz” first became notorious in 2019 when he and his followers staged a protest against CFAR that resulted in a police standoff.

Ziz accused Yudkowsky of sexually abusing minors and other malfeasances, but the accusations were expressed in a bunch of jargon that struck police as insane gibberish. And this is where I direct you to Nirit Weiss-Blatt’s article from September 2024, “When Effective Altruism Takes a Dark Turn.” Y’all remember that “Effective Altruism” (EA) was part of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX scam. There is a close connection between EA and the “rationality” promoted by CFAR.

The nexus of this is “AI Doomerism,” i.e., the belief that “the most pressing problem in the world is preventing an apocalypse where an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) exterminates humanity.” This is the organizing fear of the existential risk (“x-risk”) community, which concerns itself with probability of doom, “p(doom).”

Weiss-Blatt quotes AI researcher John Wentworth as saying that “some people are very predisposed to craziness spirals”:

“’AI is likely to kill us all’ is definitely a thing in response to which one can fall into a spiral-of-craziness, so we naturally end up ‘attracting’ a bunch of people who are behaviorally well-described as ‘looking for something to go crazy about.’” . . . “On that model,” he concluded, “insofar as EAs and rationalists sometimes turn crazy, it’s mostly a selection effect. ‘AI is likely to kill us all’ is a kind of metaphorical flypaper for people predisposed to craziness spirals.”

Is the point clear enough? The “rationalist community” originated with Yudkowsky, the Godfather of AI Doomerism, and it was logically predictable that this would attract a lot of crazy people, which is what ultimately explains how “Ziz”/Lasota became the leader of a vegan transgender death cult. Some further reading:

As you can see, this story is beginning to attract more widespread attention, although it is not yet a national media story. Eventually, I think it will be the subject of a documentary on Netflix, at the very least, and perhaps a segment on “60 Minutes.” In the meantime, I’ll keep updating you — got a lot of traffic Tueesday from a Reddit link — because how can I resist the temptation of writing more RADICAL VEGAN TRANSGENDER DEATH CULT headlines?

UPDATE: Vegan Transgender Death Cult Update: Zizian ‘Anti-Law Enforcement Ideology’



 

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