Well, that went better than I thought it would. We played the Daytraders last Sunday and took two games out of three; we lost the opener to Vida Blue but won game 2 in extra innings on an RBI single by Tom Grieve, and in game three we pounded Larry Gura for 12 runs while holding the Daytraders scoreless. Against the Tribe, we likewise lost Game One to Steve Busby 0-3, but in Game 2 we thumped Dave Freisleben 3-0 and in Game 3 Jim Kaat went the distance against Mickey Lolich and we rallied for three runs in the bottom of the 8th against Bob Reynolds to win it 5-2. So we’re still in second place, seven games behind the Twins and 1.5 games ahead of the Brewers. We may slither into the playoffs even if we don’t reach .500. This week we’re facing the Giants on Tuesday and the Dodgers on Friday. Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.
CUMBERLAND, Md. (AP) — A member of a group known to outsiders as Zizians that is linked to six deaths was bailed out of jail in Maryland on Friday.
Police in Maryland connected Jack “Ziz” LaSota, Michelle Zajko and Daniel Blank to homicide investigations in California, Pennsylvania and Vermont after a landowner found them living in box trucks at the end of a snow-covered dirt road last February, according to court documents and pretrial testimony. Blank was bailed out Friday at about noon after posting $15,000. Blank’s attorney Rebecca Lechliter declined comment. Zajko and LaSota remain in custody and are being held without bail. Blank’s release includes conditions that he must live alone and submit to GPS tracking.
The deaths linked to the group reached six last year when a U.S. border agent was killed in Vermont. The three members were later arrested on trespassing and gun charges in the woods of western Maryland. Seven of the group’s members are jailed in three states, all awaiting trial.
Maryland state Trooper Brandon Jeffries wrote after their Feb. 16, 2025 arrests that all the “suspects involved are to be questioned regarding other crimes that have occurred across the country and have ties with the Zizians Cult.”
Called “Zizians” by outsiders, the young, highly intelligent computer scientists appear to share radical beliefs about veganism, animal rights, gender identity and artificial intelligence. Since 2022, members have been tied to the death of one of their own during an attack on a California landlord, the landlord’s subsequent killing, the shooting deaths of Zajko’s parents in Pennsylvania, and a highway shootout in Vermont that left the border agent and another Zizian dead.
Jury selection was supposed to start recently in Cumberland, Maryland, where LaSota, Zajko and Blank are charged with possession of LSD and possession with intent to deliver LSD, multiple gun violations, trespassing and hindering a police officer.
The trial was delayed until June, however, after Zajko, who also is charged with resisting arrest, fired her attorney, briefly represented herself and hired a new lawyer.
This isn’t too surprising During their initial hearing in Allegany County District Court last year, Blank’s case for release was clearly the most sympathetic. Whereas both LaSota and Zajko are facing federal charges and are “persons of interests” in active homicide investigations, Blank has not been implicated in any crimes other than the state charges related to the trio’s arrest while trespassing last year near Frostburg. His stepfather appeared on Blank’s behalf at that hearing, where the defendants were represented by public defender Rebecca Francoeur-Breeden:
Sitting in the courtroom Tuesday, we heard Daniel Blank’s squeaky voice blabbering incomprensibly, then Ms. Francoeur-Breeden mentioned that Blank has mental health issues. She said Blank’s stepfather, who was willing to help Blank get some kind of local residence if he could be released, had flown in from California and was present in the courtroom. Judge Bean asked the stepfather to stand up and address the bench. He was a gray-haired man in a brown overcoat, obviously distraught, and said he would do whatever he could to help his stepson. Daniel Blank reportedly has dyslexia and is somewhere on the “spectrum” of autism. Yet, as Ms. Francoeur-Breeden told the court, he was unquestionably “brilliant”:
Daniel Blank was born in Berkeley, California and always excelled in school, earning straight A’s and praise from his teachers, his mother Nadia Blank told Open Vallejo. He competed on a science bowl team throughout middle and high school and was fluent in three languages, she said.
Blank, who became vegan in college, graduated a semester early from the University of California, Berkeley with a double major in bioengineering and computer science, according to a resume posted on his LinkedIn profile. As an undergraduate, he conducted research for two Berkeley professors and interned at Oracle and Daphnia Labs.
Blank’s mother said he accepted a high-paying corporate offer in Oakland following graduation.
Blank disappeared in 2022, and seeing his stepfather in court was emotionally jarring. Being a father myself, what must it be like to have your “brilliant” stepson disappear, end up in some kind of weird cult, and get arrested in connection with a nationwide crime spree?
And so it appears that the court, not wishing to seem unreasonable — and considering that the prosecution has apparently found no evidence implicating Blank in any other crimes connected to the Zizian cult — has finally agreed to let him out on bond pending the state trial now scheduled for June. Will keep you updated on any further developments.
Liberalism is about winning elections. Whatever the actual results of liberal policies may be, in terms of the well-being of the people who vote for liberals, are of no real consequence. So long as liberals keep winning elections, they consider their policies successful. We see this all the time in places like Baltimore, Philadelphia and St. Louis where, no matter how objectively bad things get — no matter how much poverty, misery and violence prevail — Democrats keep getting re-elected.
For eons, Canadians have viewed Alabama as a small state that, save for a few pockets, is dirt poor. All anybody seems to know about Alabama is that Montgomery and Birmingham were the centre of the civil rights movement. In 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he called Birmingham “probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.”
So, it was a shock when Canadian economist Trevor Tombe and the International Monetary Fund ran the numbers in 2023 and 2024 and concluded that Canada had, in fact, become poorer than Alabama. . . .
After adjusting for foreign exchange and some cost differences in both countries, the average for Canada’s 10 provinces was estimated at at US$55,000 in 2022, the same as Alabama. Shortly after, the IMF found Canada had actually fallen behind the southern state. (Canada has since edged ever-so-slightly higher than Alabama; the numbers are volatile from year to year.)
The timing was terrible for the Canadian psyche. Home prices were on an astronomical trajectory, inflation made everyday items such as groceries far more expensive and there was deep resentment toward Ottawa. Canadians could probably stomach having their living standards slip relative to the broader U.S., the epicentre of the world’s tech revolution. But Alabama? . . .
Yes, Alabama! If anyone wonders why Canada is now lagging behind Alabama, let me make a digression. About 30 years ago, I noticed an emerging theme in Democratic messaging. Our problem, they said, was a “growing gap between rich and poor.” This was the theme of numerous newspaper columns and a talking point in speeches by Democratic politicians, and it got me to wondering why this gap was growing.
Was it a matter of economic policy? Was racism — “RAAAAACISM!” — somehow a factor in this growing gap? And after some study, itn finally hit me: Immigration! It turns out that an influx of cheap labor from the Third World increases poverty. You don’t need a Harvard Ph.D. to figure this out. Every year during the 1990s, at least a million immigrants (both legal and illegal) were being added to the U.S. population. Most of these immigrants came from countries much poorer than the United States, lacked specialized work skills and arrived with few if any assets.
Most were not fluent in English, and quite a few of them were completely illiterate, even in their own native languages. No matter what other policy the government might pursue, the constant addition of so many immigrants — a million this year, a million next year, and so on, year after year — would inevitably increase the percentage of the population living at or below the poverty line. But liberals were ignoring this obvious factor in economic trends, instead focusing on statistical changes that got translated to “a growing gap between rich and poor.”
Importing 8 million immigrants, hosting them and their children, and reducing foundational Canadians to 60% of the population is what has made Canada poorer than Alabama. https://t.co/UL0iZwn7wwpic.twitter.com/fgriGljfp3
In the 2015 election, Canada’s Liberal Party defeated the Conservative Party, and Justin Trudeau was the Prime Minister for the next 10 years before being succeeded by another Liberal, Mark Carney. So during a decade when the United States has rocked back and forth — Obama, then Trump, then Biden, then Trump again — Canada has been governed the whole time by the Liberal Party. And as long as the Liberals keep winning elections, that’s success, even though they’re falling behind Alabama.
Big hat-tip to Luke Rosiak of the Daily Wire for calling attention to a story I missed last year. Probably gonna write more about this later on my Substack, but it’s a big enough story I can give you the gist of it here and still have plenty left to chew on over there. Ten years ago, Wesley Lowery was basically the poster boy for diversity in journalism.
In college, Lowery did internships at the Detroit News, the Columbus Dispatch, and the Wall Street Journal, then hired on at the Boston Globe in 2013, when he was 23. A year later, he was hired at the Washington Post, which had just brought in ex-Globe editor Marty Baron as their new top editor. Not long after Lowery joined the Post, he was sent to Ferguson, Missouri, to cover the 2014 race riots there. Talk about a career being “fast-tracked,” Lowery was moving at hyper-speed — front-page bylines in the Washington Post at age 24? Bob Woodward didn’t even join the Post until he was 27. Lowery’s star soared even higher the next year when he was made the lead reporter on the Post’s “Fatal Force” project, which compiled a database of police shootings (and other fatalities) nationwide, a project awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2016.
Behind all this success, however, it appears that Lowery had a drinking problem and also a woman problem — the two problems were not unrelated — and while womanizing drunks have never been rare in the world of journalism, you can’t do that if you’re a university professor, because Title IX essentially criminalizes male heterosexual behavior:
Wesley J. Lowery, a Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter and one of the most influential journalists of his generation, has left his positions as the executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop and as an associate professor of journalism at American University in Washington, DC, after less than two years there. His departure follows a number of complaints against him, according to former colleagues, including at least three Title IX allegations, in which he was accused of improper behavior with colleagues and female students.
That was March 2025, and Lowery’s getting axed from his university gig wasn’t the end of the story. In the post-“Me Too” environment, it was necessary not merely to get Lowery fired from his job, but to drive a stake through the heart of his career, to ensure that he was permanently excluded from journalism forever. Two months after Lowery’s exit from American University, the Columbia Journalism Review published a lengthy account of his habitual lechery. One of the CJR’s sources was Imani Moise, a Wall Street Journal reporter who knew Lowery through the National Association of Black Journalists:
At the time of these encounters — which spanned from 2018 to 2024, when he had reached the height of his media stardom — each of these women viewed Lowery as a professional contact, someone they knew socially and looked up to, not as a romantic partner with whom they were engaging in consensual sex. Until now, some had feared making noise about Lowery, beyond telling a few confidants. “He was the golden boy, held up on this pedestal,” Moise said. She deeply felt his importance to journalism, to American culture, to so much. “He was Mr. BLM.”
Left to right: Jack LaSota, Michelle Zajko, Daniel Blank
Monday was the one-year anniversary of the capture of three members of the “Zizian” cult, including the group’s leader Jack “Ziz” LaSota. The trio had been camping on private property near Frostburg, Maryland, when the property owner called police who arrested them on state charges, only to discover that they were subjects of a nationwide manhunt. LaSota and Michelle Zajko were both wanted in connection with various crimes to which the cult was believed to be connected, including the January 20, 2025, murder of a Border Patrol agent in a shootout in Vermont. The third member arrested in Frostburg was Daniel Blank, who had dropped out of UC-Berkeley and cut off contact with his family in California for two years prior to turning up in western Maryland.
CUMBERLAND, Md. (AP) — The violent deaths linked to the group known as Zizians stopped at six a year ago, after a U.S. border agent was killed and three members were arrested on trespassing and gun charges in the woods of western Maryland. Seven of the group’s members are jailed in three states, all awaiting trial.
Police in Maryland quickly connected Jack “Ziz” LaSota, Michelle Zajko and Daniel Blank to homicide investigations in California, Pennsylvania and Vermont after a landowner found them living in box trucks at the end of a snow covered dirt road last February, according to court documents and pre-trial testimony.
“All the suspects involved are to be questioned regarding other crimes that have occurred across the country and have ties with the Zizians Cult,” Maryland state Trooper Brandon Jeffries wrote after their Feb. 16, 2025 arrests. But their prosecutions have only inched along amid trial delays and little action in other cases.
Called “Zizians” by outsiders, the young, highly intelligent computer scientists appear to share radical beliefs about veganism, animal rights, gender identity and artificial intelligence. Since 2022, members have been tied to the death of one of their own during an attack on a California landlord, the landlord’s subsequent killing, the shooting deaths of Zajko’s parents in Pennsylvania, and a highway shootout in Vermont that left the border agent and another Zizian dead. Jury selection was supposed to start this week in Cumberland, Maryland, where LaSota, Zajko and Blank are charged with possession of LSD and possession with intent to deliver LSD, multiple gun violations, trespassing and hindering a police officer. The trial was delayed until June, however, after Zajko, who also is charged with resisting arrest, fired her attorney, briefly represented herself and hired a new lawyer.
In handwritten filings, she has made sprawling allegations of rights violations by snitches inside the Allegany County Detention Center and lies by police and prosecutors.
“In the interest of Hope, Justice and Truth, for the good of all people, and for the establishment of a true peace, the defense moves to dismiss this case,” Zajko declared in 20 pages of neat but almost indecipherably small handwriting.
Their lawyers and the lead prosecutor have all declined comment or not responded to interview requests. Zajko also is accused of supplying the guns two other Zizians used in a fatal shootout in Vermont in January 2025, although her federal court docket starts and ends with the complaint charging her with lying to a Vermont gun dealer.
In that case, Teresa Youngblut is accused of opening fire on Border Patrol Agent David Maland during a traffic stop before another agent wounded her and killed her companion, Felix Bauckholt. The encounter happened just hours after President Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term, but in a Maryland court filing, Zajko sought to blame it on a culture of impunity she says is now evident in the administration’s mass deportation campaign. “Renee Good is probably dead because the regime has so far been able to get away with murdering Ms. Bauckholt & framing Youngblut,” Zajko claimed. Good was fatally shot last month by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis. Neither ICE nor border patrol officials responded to messages seeking comment. Zajko claimed authorities arrested the group to prevent them from exonerating Youngblut, who has pleaded not guilty in Vermont to murder and could face the death penalty if convicted.
“It is an act of obscene cruelty, despotism & the mark of a tyrannical regime to use a bad faith investigation & the threat of phony charges to conceal exculpatory evidence, threaten witnesses into silence, or threaten to put an innocent person to death, all to protect a murderous border patrol human,” wrote Zajko. The judge in Youngblut’s case last week suspended deadlines for pretrial motions, citing the complexity of the capital case and noting that the exchange of evidence “will include material related to investigations into other individuals in multiple jurisdictions.”
Two other Zizians, Suri Dao and Alexander Leatham, are charged in a 2022 attack on a landlord in California that left another member, Emma Borhanian, dead, but their trial has been postponed multiple times. Another member, Maximilian Snyder, is charged with killing the landlord, Curtis Lind, three years later, just days before the Vermont shooting.
Dao’s attorney, Brian Ford, said proceedings are suspended for competency hearings and that his client is not guilty. Attorneys for the others, as well as family members of victims and those accused, either declined to comment or did not respond to messages. LaSota, described by authorities as the apparent leader of the Zizians, has a May trial date in Baltimore federal court on a separate charge of being an armed fugitive — a charge she has asked to have dismissed, arguing it violates her Second Amendment rights.
Authorities allege LaSota faked her own death to evade charges after a 2019 protest in California and disappeared again after being accused of obstructing the investigation into the December 2022 shooting deaths of Zajko’s parents, Richard and Rita Zajko, in Chester Heights, Pennsylvania.
No one has been charged for killing the Zajkos, and the Delaware County district attorney’s office said only that it still is being investigated. Jeffries, the Maryland trooper, said in a report that “Blank is under investigation for a double homicide that occurred in Delaware County, PA.”
Authorities also have described Zajko as a person of interest in her parents’ death. She has denied any role. In her recent filing, she referred to them as “adoptive guardians” and suggested her father might have killed her mother and then himself. Richard Zajko’s sister-in-law, Rosanne Zajko, declined to comment on behalf of the family.
James Broadwater wasn’t sure what to make of the strangers dressed all in black who parked their trucks near his home in Eckhart Mines, outside Frostburg, Maryland. Then Jeffries, the state trooper, told him to Google “Zizians.”
Broadwater testified recently that he had encountered LaSota and Zajko about a half-mile uphill from his house. They asked to stay, but Broadwater gave them until the next morning to leave. After talking with his wife he called state police.
“He changed his mind because he was afraid what would happen if he asked you guys to leave,” Jeffries said when questioned by Zajko in court.
Jeffries testified that a dispatcher had told him about an Associated Press article on the Zizians, published the day before, reporting details about the six deaths. He said LaSota told him they were willing to leave but the three would not identify themselves.
Jeffries said his suspicions were heightened because of the news coverage, their tactical gear that included ammunition on gun belts, and how the trucks were parked with chains on their tires. “I wanted to make sure I identified them before they left,” he testified, and they made the arrests.
The Zizians in Maryland have been working on a joint defense while jailed, though Blank’s parents are pressing the judge to release their son on bail, and his lawyer has sought to distance him from the others. Blank “should not be detained because of the company in which he was arrested,” attorney Rebecca Lechliter wrote.
Quite a thorough summary of a complex tale, and the excerpts from Zajko’s court filings (when she was representing herself, before getting a new lawyer) make clear that she’s far gone into paranoia and the kind of grandiose thinking typical of manic-phase bipolar disorder.
The most important news here is that the trial on state charges in Cumberland will be postponed until June, and meanwhile LaSota faces a May federal trial in Baltimore. This means three or four months of waiting, and if I decide to make a road trip to cover either of those trials in person, at least I won’t be traveling in the ice and snow.
