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Jack LaSota, or 'Ziz,' is the mysterious leader of the Zizians and was arrested on Sunday evening alongside fellow group member Michelle Zajko in Allegany County. The pair are being held in the Allegany County jail on firearm and trespassing offenses and charges of obstructing or hindering authorities, according to online court records.
Further details about the charges against LaSota, who uses she/her pronouns, and Zajko were not readily available Monday. An attorney for LaSota did not immediately return a request for comment.
The Maryland State Police, the Allegany County State's Attorney's Office and the FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday; courts and many government agencies are closed in observation of President's Da
https://recentlybooked.com/MD/Allegany/JACK-LASOTA~1802_57555
Previous breads 
https://rdrama.net/post/337627/aella-marseysniff-gives-the-qrd-marseylongpost
https://rdrama.net/post/338244/has-anyone-heard-about-this-mansonstyle
https://rdrama.net/post/338323/the-ziz-marseytransflag2-marseychadfoid-marseyschizotwitch-cult
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top post on the subreddit for the week, /r/atheism circa 2012, locked for good reason
wtf hair but the cat is nice
beyblade cholo
KFC neighbor
https://old.reddit.com/r/mensfashion/comments/1ini1oq/are_modern_suit_jackets_shorter/
not a good face post
https://old.reddit.com/r/mensfashion/comments/1io4z2d/100_thrifted/
gabagool
https://old.reddit.com/r/mensfashion/comments/1ioope5/black_always_looks_good/
have you heard of our lord and savior jesus christ?
https://old.reddit.com/r/mensfashion/comments/1il71zj/saturday_late_night_dress_up/
- Tillicum : Screenshotposting
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What a lie.
— Andreas Mogensen (@Astro_Andreas) February 20, 2025
And from someone who complains about lack of honesty from the mainstream media. https://t.co/DxofPYolon
You are fully r-slurred.
โ Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 20, 2025
SpaceX could have brought them back several months ago.
I OFFERED THIS DIRECTLY to the Biden administration and they refused.
Return WAS pushed back for political reasons.
Idiot.
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You should get a spine and have it installed. It's wayyy too early to panic, because a lot more of this shit is coming. If you think it's bad now, you've got another thing coming.
I am overjoyed that someone is finally starting to weed out the financial corruption we have been enduring all these years. I don't see why this would make you panicky. We should all be happy we finally have a real leader at the helm.
Worried? I'm ecstatic AF! This is exactly what I voted for!
However, I can see why you're having issues.
1. You and your party has no power. You have been rendered impotent
2. You're weak AF
How to solve this? Get off the Internet. Go do something active, man or woman the frick up!
Then leave.
Yea heaven forbid Americans complain about American things on an American app supported by an American company. [-6]
You should see a therapist. This isn't remotely a bad period of time compared to historical standards
Edit for the downmarseyrs: you need to bear in mind that a lot of people lived through decades where nuclear war seemed like a lot more than a hypothetical possibility.
Everything is finally getting better.
I feel you and totally relate. If you want a friend to mutually lean on for support during this insane time, please feel free to message me. [-25]
Shut upppppppp
It's NOT you. The average person is under-reacting because they don't want it messing up their routine or taking their crumbs.
The government is objectively being dismantled and people should not just be acting like it's BAU.
Eventually this is going to trickle down on all of us and not just the immigrants and government workers.
I didn't care about your guys election choices until your leader started threatening my country here in Canada every other day with erasing it off the face of the Earth.
I'm feeling anxious aswell . [-6]
Another USAID worker chiming in [๐คฃ]
You're the problem.
Get off the internet. The real world is not the one that exists in your mind, and places like reddit only serve to convince you that they are.
Would you rather find joy or justify misery?
If you're honest about that answer, it will reveal everything you need to know about your direction in life.
Yeah shit is really bad. These people telling you that what is going on is good is either gaslamping you or just dumb as frick.
You have to mentally check out some. Being hyper aware won't get much accomplished. You have to take a step back. Grieve whatever loss it is in stride.
Don't let anyone gaslamp you into trying to tell you that removing environmental protections, deleting our data, setting up a literal concentration camp, subverting the constitution, etc are good things. They are not.
It's hard to control panic attacks and I don't know the best way to subvert them. Know you aren't alone. You care about other people and don't let anyone try and take that from you. Let your voice be heard if you can.
The current regime is NOT on the right side of history. Most of them know it too.
This is what I imagine every redditor is like in real life as I read all the seething going on here the last couple months
I am putting on my blinders and taking solace in that the US thought it wise to train me in violence.
I won't go full radical unless someone questions my kid's citizenship.
I do seem to be in a state like I was in the Army, where I am comfortable and ready to respond with deadly force. I've never really experienced that so casually before. [-8]
If this isn't bait, you need to get mental help. Your team didn't win, thats how our government works. Try again in 4 years. But to be this affected by an election isn't a normal reaction
I accepted myself as trans a little over a year ago. Started hrt maybe 6 or more months ago.
I cry almost every other day on the way home from work since the inauguration. I'm terrified, and filled with hopelessness and anger.
Edit: to those who REALLY think I'm overreacting, look at and read the executive orders around trans people. Look at what he's doing to the CDC. Look at the people who lost care already, who can't get their passports back.
If you still don't believe it's bad, kindly frick right off yeah? [-3]
I think some level of concern is okay, but it should not make it impossible for you to function in day to day life. Like others said, I would seek out therapy. You make what you can out of it because life can't stop.
id seek therapy. Im significantly less than happy but calling out of work out of fear is a little extreme
.webp?h=10 "Nuzzles, pounces on you, UwU, you're so warm!..")
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Most Based Comments
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The blue states would prosper. The red states would not. The red states would beg for re unification within a few years.Remember that time a bunch of libertarians tried to take over a town and shortly after they were overrun with bears? It would be like that but on a much larger scale (10)
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[deleted] (9)
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I'm not sure that you understand that all that red is where nobody lives, except the uneducated, low class people who don't realize democratic policies actually benefit them.
(1)
Angriest Comments
Angriness: ๐ก๐ก๐ก๐ก๐ก
You have a child's way of viewing complex issues. Food shortages would never happen. Surprise, blue states grow shit too. They also buy, and pragmatic red states would be more than happy to sell locally rather than export.Nukes, this is a joke, right. This more sounds like $Trump bullshit. Go ahead, picture one single nuke on our continent. Just one, anywhere. There are too many analogies to dumb this down; ya don't shit where you get your food, dip ur pen in the company inkwell, etc. The result would be catastrophic both human and commercial. Those farmers you brag so much about, their corn immediately has no market. Drown in their own corn if you will.The truth is somewhere near this; the large blue and red states would be fine. The remaining dregs will need to figure out how to sell their worthiness or will simply be absorbed by the larger ones. (0)
Angriness: ๐ก๐ก๐ก๐ก๐ก
Our country is very interconnected and unfortunately it would be an ugly war for us to split. (4)
Angriness: ๐ก๐ก๐ก๐ก๐ก
I don't think it's the same at allThe civil war was about slavery and federalism, mostly slaveryI think the current climate is very broad imo (1)
Biggest Lolcow: /u/t3chguy1
Score: ๐ฎ๐ฎ๐ฎ๐ฎ๐
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Average angriness: ๐๐๐๐๐
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NEW: Subscribe to /h/miners to see untapped drama veins, ripe for mining! 
autodrama: automating away the jobs of dramneurodivergents. 
Ping HeyMoon if there are any problems or you have a suggestion 
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Most Based Comments
Basedness: ๐ฅ๐ฅ๐๐๐
My god, the comments here every day on every post are just a chef's kiss. You guys are unhinged and ill-informed. It's glorious. (43)
It's all "orange man bad hired him so we have to hate him."All BS gaslamping propaganda. (-45)
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They will continue to blame democrats as they always do regardless if they're in or out of power. It's the only platform they have. It will always be "well Bidenโฆ" and "if Obama hadn't" until the end of time (which may be sooner rather than later.) (163)
Basedness: ๐ฅ๐๐๐๐
Those parents in Texas whose kids have measles right now must be so happy (36)
Angriest Comments
Angriness: ๐ก๐ก๐ก๐ก๐ก
Fluoride is helpful? It's pointless, only sickening people. It had a place when everyone had shitty hygiene and didn't brush their teeth but now it offers nothing positive and is only a negative. Actually it should be pretty obvious to you that the thing that cleans BONE is not good for you health wise, funny that. (-7)
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I'm not a republican, this isn't the "gotcha" you think it is. I would never hope the worst for my country or the world regardless of who's in charge. Shows how brainwashed you are. (5)
Angriness: ๐ก๐ก๐ก๐ก๐ก
It's weird, racist and pretty disgusting that your only justification for implying that Mexicans can only get here illegally, is saying "ya well half are here illegally". The point remains your continued use of racism to generalize an entire cultureKind of reminds me of what hitler did to minority groups in Germany. Do you condemn what he did? Or will you continue to use the same tactics? (3)
Biggest Lolcow: /u/HarwellDekatron
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Average angriness: ๐๐๐๐๐
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NEW: Subscribe to /h/miners to see untapped drama veins, ripe for mining!
autodrama: automating away the jobs of dramneurodivergents. Ping HeyMoon if there are any problems or you have a suggestion
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This post is courtesy of @MenAreWorst
Kingdom Come Deliverance II was released sometime in the last three months, and the henpeckers in the Girl G*mers subreddit are still upset. The OP (u/julyvale) bears accusations of misogyny:
Is anyone playing this and has a feeling all the women in the game just subtly signal to be either sexual objects or fragile damsels in danger? I know it is probably historically accurate, but it still rubs me the wrong way somehow. Recently had a convo in some baths and the NPC is literally called "Bathwench Anna". The game also literally starts by the two main characters going to "hunt" women in a pond and one girl getting almost SA until a man comes to save her. I don't mind playing as Henry and so far I don't mind the male oriented story (again), but maybe that will change too. The game is very pretty and immersive, though.
Though admits to enjoying the game. Now while dramatards seem to think that there is (or was) a peepee for every girl on /r/girlg*mers, this post has me second guessing this hate fact, and being generally inclined towards sloth, I'll let you decide whether the OP (and other highlighted posters) are foids (innie) or foids (outtie).
OP 
Now, I present to you the spiciest drama in the thread:
Fascinating 
Hopefully the /r/girlg*mers mods get r*ped in The Sims.
Returning to the remaining comments, most of the people 
choose to ignore the OP's post (understandably, there's not much to go off of in it), and instead return to hate circle jerking over evil Nazi Daniel Vavra. Let's see what they have to say:
Tbh, I'm not even giving the game a chance because the main dev is a massive biggot, chauvinist, white supremacist, and a terrible guy in general. (edited for typos)
I guess I was wrong about the Nazi allegations 
On the other hand, Vavra is guilty of almost every other thoughtcrime imaginable to foid kind 
/u/tomizu2303
This is a link to a podcast 
/u/allthejokesareblue
Finally, we get to something popcorn worthy 
/u/istvan_hun provides receipts for a redditor who, shockingly is out of the loop (amazing how little noticing is done on the general reddit phenomena of being out of the loop 
) on the Vavra accusations.
mostly happened on twitter. Vรกvra is an butthole, but it not a white supremacist.
What actually happened is that some journ*lists wanted to bully Warhorse (and give KCD1 lower ratings) for not having black charaters in the game, Vรกvra laughed at them. His reasoning was something like: why a game about medieval Bohemia, developed by czechs, should have 21th century american population makeup.*
This was enough for the twitter army to label him as white supremacist/nazi, which inmediately backfired when Vรกvra told them 1: to frick off, 2: that he is part jew, and had relatives die in the holocaust
Don't get me wrong, Vรกvra is an butthole. You can also find even older tweets when he is miserable. He is the kind of guy who always is sure of himself, and tells everyone that they are wrong (even when he is obviously out of his league). but he is not a bigot and a nazi.
He is not the guy I would be friends with, or one I would like to drink a beer with. But what game journ*lists tried to do to him was unfair.
*this actually resonated with me very much. There is one (1) game about medieval eastern europe. One. This is literally the only piece of media which represents the region correctly. (culture, countryside, villages, how people behave). Everywhere else, eastern europe is basically a land of strippers, gangsters and alcoholics. It was a glorious game for us.
Than arrive some journ*lists, who want to take away that one game from us, and make it american, like 99% of media.
You can read that if you want, the shitty formatting and rotting grammar have me convinced that this is a some sort of slav misogynist, typing away at his soviet era keyboard from somewhere in the middle of Kazakhstan, all too eager to defend a pretty reprehensible game 
Do non-bigots make a habit of wearing Nazi band t-shirts to conferences? If he's not a white supremacist, he was certainly comfortable courting them as an audience.
edit: english as second langue happened here, sorry. I misinterpreted "nazi band" as nazi armband, not Burzum (a black metal band)
He might be french actually. Unsurprising that a filthy 
would come out to simp for his country's traditional virtues highlighted in /u/tomizu2303's comment.
/u/istvan_hun
I'm not going to pretend to care about any more of this extremely stupid argument, here's the rest of it
Now to vote on /u/istvan_hun's interlocutor:
/u/chickpeasaladsammich
Now, another thread, where a commenter brings up 
favorite subject: Archaeology.
It's not actually historically accurate, women have never been one-dimensional characatures. That's just how the men making the game decided to depict then.
Studies of DNA in bones have taught us that about 30-50% of viking warriors were women, but the men who found remains saw items belonging to warriors and mislabeled them men. This is something we've discovered is true for many cultures, men working in anthropology from the days they denied women the ability to work in their field would mislabel chiefs, warriors, hunters and other remains they precieved as doing masculine roles as men, when it reality women have always done those things.
As far as the game goes, I gave it as pass, until the gaming industry has fair representation of women and POC in video games, I won't play games with white male protagonists.
/u/NerdQueenAlice
There's a fairly decent discussion below this, with the overall conclusion being that no force on earth is greater than pvre aryan sperg power. One funny exchange
According to them, you only had whites as well...not a fan of these developers tbh
In rural parts of Bohemia in the early 1400s? Probably not that far from the truth. In the new game which is set in a more urban area you get to see non-white people too.
I think that was due to backlash from the first one, anyway, they've made comments online I'm not a fan off.
let's get a replay on that.
Hmmm, seems like displacement. Sometimes a cigar really is just a peepee 
/u/jujoking
Other stuff from the thread:
Not to diss Henry of Skalitz, who I think is a good character, but I wish we could have played the whole game as Theresa :(. That dlc legit made me realize I was trans.
Chudbros, were we the real egg crackers? 
Anyways, there's a slapfight in there too, but my eyes glazed over, it's some r-slur with a default username fighting with a bunch of presumable 
s 
If you really want to take a look at it be my guest, but there'll be another just like it tomorrow.
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Those "bah, bah, bahs" were a big mistake Chris. Here's the guitar solo at the end without all that bullshit and not mixed into the background as it was in that travesty of sound arrangement:
Produced by a Michael Omartin (no apostrophe). He also arranged the awful 'We are the World' and should be taken out back and shot.
- H0m0l0v3N1ghtm4r3 : What's the difference between the front page and /h/chudrama at this point
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- FriedFish : nyoooo stop making fun of redditors!! you're a chud!!!
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they don't make kino like House anymore, everyone is so easily offended nowdays
no do not laugh over small pp jokes, in real life they should get a life sentence no parole. Imagine if the genders were reversed
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All comments hinting that this /r/datingover40 inhabitant with 50 s*x toys might be a bit deranged are heavily downmarseyd.
This is why I don't use toys, I don't want my pleasure tolerance to get so high a man can't please me. If I masturbate, I'm using my hands. I prefer s*x with men.
I use vibrators and this hasn't really happened to me. I can still easily get there with a competent partner I'm genuinely attracted to. It's a whole different thing. Apples and oranges.
Most men simply don't fit those criteria.
This subforum is bizarre and sad. A human touch is better than a God darn toy. I don't know why this board keeps projecting their bad experiences onto other women. You are better off with 1 or 2 orgasms with a man than a 5 plus orgasms with a toy. There is something so dehumanizing about this re occurring topic.
Newsflash, some people can have different opinions than your own......
I think this is in the same vein of disassociation as excessive pornography usage. It seems like our culture is obsessed with removing human beings from the equation to our own detriment. And when we lose the ability to connect, we further detachment from the human element of sexuality.
S*x isn't perfect, it's messy, it's not clean, it doesn't always get us to the finish line, but it is a connection and passion between two people. That's what makes it so special, the human face to face interaction. That's what makes it wonderful. The lack of perfection. There's always trying again, always learning about each other more and that deepens our bond together.
Sorry but when the orgasm gap is a real thing and many femme AFAB people are choosing to skip out or use toys then it is absolutely not the same as excessive p0rn consumption. It's entirely possible to have trauma associated with sexual encounters I know I have it and I'd rather be safe than put in a difficult situation again.
Honestly OP this reads like it was written as wank fodder
I am curious who out there has 50 s*x toys...
Hypermuscular Hindu Hridaysamrat - 35
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How sweet ๐โค๏ธ A little girl from Uzbekistan and young boy from Lebanon greet each other at the blessed Masjid Al Haram in Makkah atop the shoulders of their parents. May Allah bless them. pic.twitter.com/PLJSYMzbfw
— Muslim Daily (@muslimdaily_) February 12, 2025
Well mb their parents don't r*pe them like yours did, Paki.
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"During that whole "white terrorism in gaming" thing where people honestly believed a 13 old girl was gang r*ped in a Games Workshop while all the g*mers chanted "Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed" I created an account there and made a few rather innocuous posts.
I was banned within like 3 hours with the ban reason being "Eh, probably a troll account.""
Did anyone here about this madness? It sounds like an amazing moral panic.
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This is only "chapter one"! If you are a 
!bookworms you can find all the others here.
I've never read Into Thin Air but I fricking hate youtube video essay dudes, so I'm #TeamKrakauer in this beef.
In August 2024, I began to receive comments in my Instagram feed warning me that a YouTuber named Michael Tracy had been aggressively maligning my book, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster. One commenter observed that Tracy's defamatory statements were "getting out of hand. The man really has an agenda against you, and most people just don't question it."
Michael Lion Tracy, I learned, is a middle-aged lawyer based in Irvine, California. He's posted more than 100 videos on his YouTube channel, which has 130,000 subscribers. He gained approximately 30,000 of these subscribers after he started posting inflammatory videos about my book.
In April 2024, Tracy posted the first of at least sixteen videos (thus far) claiming to have identified numerous errors in my book about the 1996 Everest disaster, most of which he claims are lies intended to promote a deliberately false narrative.
Almost all of Tracy's allegations are demonstrably untrue, and the sheer volume of prevarication in his videos is astounding. Although he holds me and others he criticizes to the highest standards of accuracy โ as he absolutely should โ he fails to hold himself to the same exacting standards. His videos don't adhere to any standard of truth whatsoever.
Before going any further, however, I want to acknowledge up front that Tracy has identified a number of genuine errors in Into Thin Air, and I am grateful to him for pointing them out. I will enumerate these errors throughout my commentary as they come up, and correct them in all future editions of Into Thin Air.
It's no secret that controversy and outrage boost attention and juice revenue on the Internet, of course, and perhaps this explains Tracy's dishonest campaign to discredit me. But many of his attacks on my integrity are delivered with a degree of grievance and invective that suggests he is seeking to do more than just troll me. Tracy's denunciations seem to be motivated by something deeper and more personal.
In most of his videos about my book, Tracy seems to be trying to do what the MAGA podcaster Steve Bannon famously called "flooding the zone with shit" โ spewing forth such an overwhelming torrent of misinformation that it creates lasting doubt about what's true and what isn't. Tracy's videos about me include dozens of deceitful statements, and he continues to post additional misleading videos on an intermittent basis โ which for all practical purposes renders any attempt to refute every spurious claim in his videos an exercise in futility.
There's an axiom about online discourse known as the "Bullshit Asymmetry Principle" that accurately asserts, "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it." Given the damage Tracy is attempting to inflict on my reputation, and his irresponsible misrepresentations of what happened on Everest in 1996, I feel the need to debunk as much of his bullshit as possible, despite the magnitude of the effort required to do so, even if it proves to be largely ineffective.
Twelve people perished on Everest in 1996, and it's important to have an accurate understanding of what led to the loss of so many lives โ both out of respect to those who died, and to help prevent similar tragedies from occurring in the future. Although climbing Everest is now significantly safer than it was in 1996 (in terms of the number of deaths compared to the number of climbers attempting the ascent), it remains an incredibly dangerous endeavor โ and many, many more people are trying to reach the summit these days. In 2024, nine people died on the mountain. In 2023, there were eighteen deaths.
Tracy's obsessive campaign to discredit me goes well beyond denigrating my book on his YouTube channel. Tracy acolytes can pay $50 per month to become his "Yeti Apprentices" and thereby assist his campaign.
His most devoted followers receive invitations to join Tracy's inner circle: a confidential Groomercord server where Tracy and his minions share misinformation. Here's one of Tracy's Groomercord posts:
In 2013, Tracy climbed Mt. Everest from the Chinese side of the mountain as a paying client on a commercial expedition. In August 2017, he posted the first of many videos about Everest, and announced his intent to "locate Andrew Irvine and document the 1924 climb of Mallory & Irvine."
Andrew "Sandy" Irvine was the English climber who famously disappeared with George Mallory while attempting to make the first ascent of Everest. Mallory's body had been discovered in 1999 by Conrad Anker some 2,300 vertical feet below the summit. The discovery included personal effects that offered tantalizing clues about Mallory's demise, including a short length of climbing rope tied around his waist, suggesting that he and Irvine probably perished while climbing or descending together on the same rope. The rope appeared to have broken or been severed during a fall from higher on the peak. Anker and his expedition teammates, however, found no sign of Sandy Irvine.
In 2018, Tracy returned to the north side of Everest to search for Irvine's remains. But Tracy has never set foot on the south side of Everest โ the Nepal side of the mountain, where most of the events described in Into Thin Air took place. Nor, to my knowledge, has he ever interviewed a single person who was directly involved in the 1996 disaster. Nevertheless, in 2024 he began presenting himself as an authority on the 1996 Everest disaster and making deceitful claims about the veracity of my book. This treatise will focus on refuting some of Tracy's most egregious false allegations.
This is the first of what will be eight separate chapters of commentary. I intend to the post a new chapter every day or so going forward.
As the person who alerted me to Michael Tracy's smear campaign observed, he has an agenda and it's not subtle. The narration in his videos is often delivered with a mix of derision, disdain, and snark. Occasionally he includes childish memes such as the two examples below for shits and giggles. Tracy's videos are not posted in any discernable order, nor are they always easy to follow. He jumps around a lot and sometimes contradicts himself. Frequently he repeats the same allegations in multiple videos. Thus my commentary will necessarily jump around, too.
I'll begin my effort to refute Michael Tracy's most outrageous allegations by debunking his claim that there were no significant delays on the Nepal side of Everest on May 10, 1996. Concurrently, I will also refute his related claim that any delays that did occur had little or nothing to do with the failure to fix ropes in advance on sections of the climbing route where such ropes were typically installed to safeguard clients.
Early in our 1996 expedition, Rob Hall, the leader of the guided team I was on, decided that if the weather forecast was favorable, we would attempt to reach the summit on May 10. Hall encouraged Scott Fischer, the leader of another guided group, to have his team go for the summit on the same day, and Fischer agreed to this plan, even though traffic jams at places on the route where fixed ropes would be necessary were anticipated to be a potential problem, given that so many climbers would be going for the top at the same time. As I wrote in Chapter 13 of Into Thin Air:
Hall, who had climbed Everest four times previously, understood as well as anybody the need to get up and down quickly. Recognizing that the basic climbing skills of some of his clients were highly suspect, Hall intended to rely on fixed lines to safeguard and expedite both our group and Fischer's group over the most difficult ground. The fact that no expedition had been to the top yet this year concerned him, therefore, because it meant that ropes had not been installed over much of this terrainโฆ. Anticipating this possibility, before leaving Base Camp, Hall and Fischer convened a meeting of guides from both teams, during which they agreed that each expedition would dispatch two Sherpas โ including the climbing sirdars, Ang Dorje and Lopsang [Jangbu] โ from Camp Four ninety minutes ahead of the main groups. This would give the Sherpas time to install fixed lines on the most exposed sections of the upper mountain before the clients arrived. "Rob made it very clear how important it was to do this," recalls [Neal] Beidleman [one of Fischer's guides]. "He wanted to avoid a time-consuming bottleneck at all costs."
Hall and Fischer agreed that Ang Dorje and Lopsang Jangbu would depart from Camp Four at 26,000 feet on the South Col around 10:00 P.M. on May 9 to fix the ropes. Hall's team would then start up at 11:30, followed by Fischer's team at midnight. For some unknown reason, however, no Sherpas left the South Col ahead of us on the night of May 9. Therefore no new ropes were fixed in advance, which caused major delays at two bottlenecks where climbers were forced to wait for fixed ropes to be installed.
On May 13, 2024, Michael Tracy posted a video on his YouTube channel titled, "Analysis of Scott Fischer's photo from South Summit," in which he claims that delays at these bottlenecks were minimal or nonexistent, and the delays that did occur had little or nothing to do with the failure to fix ropes ahead of time. Tracy's video is prefaced with a block of text explaining that it analyzes
a photo taken by Scott Fischer to determine what happened on the upper part of Mount Everest on May 10, 1996. Looks at various accounts from Jon Krakauer and determines they do not match up with photographs taken that day.
The photo in question, shown below, appears on page 240 of Into Thin Air: The Illustrated Edition, a special edition of the book that is no longer in print*.* The summit of Everest isn't visible in Fischer's photo. I've added the annotations in red for this commentary.
Tracy claims in his video that this photo, and others in my book, prove there were no bottlenecks causing noteworthy delays at the fixed ropes, contrary to what I wrote. In the comment he posted on Groomercord on April 17, 2024, Tracy says:
You will see that the "rope fixing" issue is an invention of Krakauer to explain his slow climbing timeโฆ. Once you realize that everything people think they know about this was a story fabricated to make Jon Krakauer look better than he was, the whole thing makes sense. There are no mysteries about what happened.
Tracy is wrong. Photos, videos, and statements from numerous climbers who encountered the bottlenecks confirm that there were indeed significant delays at fixed ropes installed to safeguard climbers, and that those delays were exacerbated by the undisputed fact that ropes were not fixed in advance as intended.
In the center of Fischer's photo is the notorious Hillary Step, which is almost always ascended with the aid of approximately 80 feet of fixed rope anchored at the top of the Step. This pitch would be trivial if it were on a mountain in Colorado or New Hampshire, but because it's situated nearly 29,000 feet above sea level and includes the steepest, most problematic terrain above the South Col, it's a notorious bottleneck.
Fischer shot the photo at approximately 1:00 P.M. from the South Summit, at an elevation of 28,700 feet. Neal Beidleman and Martin Adams (one of Fischer's clients) are visible at the top of the Hillary Step. Klev Schoening (another Fischer client) is about to arrive there. Anatoli Boukreev (Fischer's Head Guide), Andy Harris (a guide on Rob Hall's team), and me are out of sight above the Step. Boukreev had just arrived on the summit of Everest when Fischer took the photo, and Harris and I were less than twenty minutes below the top.
Twenty-six seconds into his May 13 video, Tracy states that 16 or possibly 17 climbers are visible in the photo.
Tracy is wrong. Careful study of the image reveals that it's likely 18 climbers are visible.
Two minutes and six seconds in, Tracy says, "At this point in timeโฆ six [climbers] are above the Hillary Step and one is just at the top of the Hillary Step. That's Sandy Pittman."
Tracy is wrong about Pittman being on top of the Step. She's actually less than halfway up. The top of the Hillary Step is located where Adams is crouching next to the anchor for the fixed rope (not visible in the photo) that terminates near the crest of the Step. Adams is paying out rope to Beidleman, who is fixing a final 330-foot length of rope across hazardous terrain that eventually leads to the summit of Everest.
At the 2:24 mark in the video, Tracy alleges the photo proves there is no "huge bottleneck at the Hillary Step at this time."
At the 4:05 mark Tracy claims, "Krakauer invented the story" of this bottleneck despite knowing Fischer's photo and other "photos contradicted his invented version. He even puts those photos in his book."
At the 4:48 mark Tracy claims that Fischer's "photo depicts the busiest the Hillary Step would be that day. There is no throng of climbers waiting to come up. This is it: the massive bottleneck Krakauer wrote about."
All of these allegations by Tracy are false. Fischer's photo shows two climbers above the Hillary Step, two climbers ascending the Step, and 14 climbers lined up below the Step waiting to ascend it. Contrary to Tracy's assertions, this photo documents a problematic bottleneck that was already delaying climbers.
In 2013 Michael Tracy climbed Everest from China, the other side of the mountain. He has never set foot on this side of Everest, the Nepal side, which is reflected in his erroneous statements about the Hillary Step and many other matters.
The photo also shows Klev Schoening ascending toward the anchor at the top of the Step as Sandy Pittman is ascending well below him, while 14 additional climbers are queued up along the ridge below them.
The bottleneck is also apparent in the image below, which is a photo Scott Fischer shot from the bottom of the Hillary Step at approximately 2:10 P.M. The climber in the green pants is a Sherpa standing at approximately the same place Sandy Pittman is standing in the photo Fischer took at 1:00 P.M. Immediately below him is Ang Dorje, Hall's most trusted Sherpa. The lowest climber, wearing a red and black down suit, is Doug Hansen, a client of Hall's who perished near the South Summit.
Below is a sequence of screen grabs from the PBS documentary, "Storm Over Everest," in which "Makalu" Gau Ming-Ho, a Taiwanese climber, and Nima Gombu, one of three Sherpas on Gau's team, confirm the bottleneck. Gau unexpectedly launched his summit attempt on May 10, which came as an unwelcome surprise to Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, because Gau was not very strong or competent, and his team worsened the congestion at the fixed ropes.
The bottleneck at the Hillary Step wasn't the only place a traffic jam occurred on May 10. Approximately 400 feet below the South Summit, an earlier bottleneck, below the ropes Neal Beidleman and Ang Dorje Sherpa fixed on the upper Southeast Ridge, caused significant delays, too, compounding the subsequent delays at the Hillary Step.
Below is a sequence of screen grabs from the PBS documentary, "Storm Over Everest," in which "Makalu" Gau Ming-Ho, a Taiwanese climber, and Nima Gombu, one of three Sherpas on Gau's team, confirm the bottleneck. Gau unexpectedly launched his summit attempt on May 10, which came as an unwelcome surprise to Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, because Gau was not very strong or competent, and his team worsened the congestion at the fixed ropes.
The bottleneck at the Hillary Step wasn't the only place a traffic jam occurred on May 10. Approximately 400 feet below the South Summit, an earlier bottleneck, below the ropes Neal Beidleman and Ang Dorje Sherpa fixed on the upper Southeast Ridge, caused significant delays, too, compounding the subsequent delays at the Hillary Step.
In Chapter 14 of The Climb, a book about the 1996 disaster co-authored by Anatoli Boukreev and G. Weston DeWalt, DeWalt wrote this concerning the bottleneck below the South Summit:
At 9:58 A.M. Beidleman made it to the South Summit, and thirty minutes later, by his recollection, he was followed by Martin Adamsโฆ. For an hour and a half to two hours, Adams recalled, he and Beidleman sat at the South Summit alone. "Basically, the problem was that everybody behind us was jammed up on the fixed ropes. Somehow, I think, some of Rob Hall's slower clients had gotten in front of our group and they couldn't pass.โฆ [They] were staggered between the Balcony and just below the South Summit, jumbled among all of Fischer's clientsโฆ and the Taiwanese climbersโฆ. The Sherpas carrying the extra oxygen, like the clients, were also strung between the South Summit and the Balcony. It was, said one of Fischer's clients, "a jungle frick."
As I explained in Chapter 13 of Into Thin Air:
Above 27,400 feet, no ropes had been fixed ahead of timeโฆ. As a consequence, I ran smack into the first bottleneck ninety minutes after moving beyond the Balcony,โฆ where the intermingled teams encountered a series of massive rock steps that required ropes for safe passage. Clients huddled restlessly at the base of the rock for nearly an hour while Beidlemanโฆ laboriously ran the rope outโฆ.
The traffic jam at the ropes grew with each arriving climber, so those at the rear of the scrum fell farther and farther behind. By late morning, three of Hall's clients โ Stuart Hutchison, John Taske, and Lou Kasischke, climbing near the back with Hall โ were becoming quite worried about the lagging pace. Immediately in front of them was the Taiwanese team, moving especially sluggishly. "They were climbing in a peculiar style, really close together," says Hutchison, "almost like slices in a loaf of bread, one behind the other, which meant it was nearly impossible to pass them. We spent a lot of time waiting for them to move up the ropes."
Despite a consensus among almost everyone who was present that bottlenecks below the South Summit and on the Hillary Step created significant delays on May 10, Tracy insists repeatedly, in multiple videos, that these delays were inconsequential, and had nothing to do with the fact that ropes weren't fixed ahead of time.
I shot the photo above at approximately 8:30 A.M. I was looking down the Southeast Ridge towards the Balcony at the time, while I waited for Neal Beidleman and Ang Dorje, who were directly above me, to start fixing the first of multiple ropes on the Southeast Ridge. Note the throng of climbers below who are ascending towards the bottom of the fixed ropes. Anticipating a delay at the obvious bottleneck ahead, some of them have already stopped at a less steep section of the Southeast Ridge to wait for the crowd to thin.
Below is a screen grab from the 10:47 mark in Tracy's video, when he says:
In this photo that is Jon Krakauer looking down towards the Balcony where he claimed to have waited for an entire hour and a half. You can see that no ropes are fixed. There was no need to fix the ropes. No one fixed them and people were not falling off the mountain, even though there was a violent storm on the descent.
Although Michael Tracy has never been on this side of Everest, he apparently considers himself more qualified to determine whether there was a need for fixed ropes on the Southeast Ridge than the guides Neal Beidleman and Michael Groom. Unlike Tracy, Beidleman and Groom were highly accomplished Himalayan climbers who were actually present on May 10, and both of them believed ropes were necessary above this point to safeguard their clients, some of whom were not highly skilled mountaineers.
The photo in the screen grab was shot by Klev Schoening from the same place where I shot the previous photo above, but approximately ten minutes later. That's Anatoli Boukreev on the left, Groom below him in the yellow down suit, me in the red suit, and just behind me is Andy Harris in the blue suit. You can see that the line of climbers who were well below us in the earlier photo have now arrived at the base of the fixed ropes, too, and are about to start waiting along with us.
Tracy is correct when he says, "You can see that no ropes are fixed." But that's because Schoening's camera was pointed down when he snapped the photo. Beidleman and Ang Dorje were fixing ropes immediately above us at the time, which explains why almost everyone in this photo is standing around instead of moving upward. The photo, in other words, documents the early moments of a major bottleneck.
In a video Tracy posted on December 30, 2024, he estimated the rate of ascent, measured in vertical feet per hour, for me, Rob Hall, Neal Beidleman, and Doug Hansen as we climbed from the South Col to the Balcony, from the Balcony to the South Summit, and finally from the South Summit to the summit of Everest in 1996. He then compared this with the estimated climbing rate of Hansen and Hall on Everest in 1995, and used this data โ shown in the screen grab below โ to arrive at the conclusion there was "no evidence of delays at fixed ropes."
Tracy's conclusion is wrong, however, because his methodology was flawed and it was based on incorrect data Tracy obtained from the Himalayan Database. (As Tracy himself has acknowledged, expedition reports in the Himalayan Database filed during the 1990s often included erroneous information.) Additionally, when Tracy compared climbing rates in 1995 to those of 1996, he failed to account for the fact that in 1995, unusually deep snow was a significant impediment that slowed the climbers' rate of ascent considerably, so his comparison was meaningless.
Tracy is correct that a small number of slow climbers contributed significantly to delays on the fixed ropes, but he is wrong to attribute the delays entirely to the lagging pace of these individuals. The delays resulted from the combination of slow climbers and the failure to fix ropes in advance, and these two factors in tandem had an adverse impact that was significantly greater than the sum of their parts. Rob Hall and Scott Fischer knew long before May 10 that some clients were likely to be quite slow; this is why they were so adamant that it was crucial for the ropes to be fixed ahead of time.
To accurately determine how much time was lost because ropes were not fixed in advance, one needs to consider how the delay at the ropes installed on the Southeast Ridge contributed to the delay at the ropes installed on the Hillary Step. There is a simple way to do this: Determine how many minutes the first client to ascend the fixed ropes on the Southeast Ridge had to wait before he could start ascending these ropes, and then add this to the number of minutes the first client to ascend the fixed ropes on the Hillary Step had to wait before he could start ascending these ropes.
Beidleman and Ang Dorje started fixing ropes up the Southeast Ridge at approximately 8:30 A.M. on May 10. Beidleman didn't finish fixing the last of the new rope, and then pulling an old rope out of the snow above it, until approximately 9:50, even though he climbed remarkably fast.
The first client to go up the fixed ropes on the Southeast Ridge was Martin Adams, who waited more than 45 minutes at the base of the ropes before he could start ascending them. On the Hillary Step, after Boukreev fixed a rope to the top, I was the first client to ascend it. I waited from approximately 11:00 A.M., when I arrived on top of the South Summit, until approximately 12:30 P.M., when I started ascending the rope up the Step. If you subtract 20 minutes to account for the time I spent traversing the corniced ridge between the South Summit and the base of the Hillary Step, I was delayed approximately 70 minutes.
The delay attributable to not fixing both sets of ropes was therefore 115 minutes. On a day when a matter of minutes determined who got down to the tents before the storm turned into a deadly hurricane and who did not, that's a lot of minutes.
At the 13:42 mark in his May 13 video Tracy alleges,
We need to look just briefly at the issue of why people were waiting at South Summit [below the Hillary Step]. The reason people were waiting had nothing to do with fixing ropesโฆ. The reason for the delays at the South Summit was bringing up the oxygen.
Tracy claims it didn't matter that fixing ropes on the Hillary Step didn't begin until after the Sherpas bringing up cannisters of oxygen arrived on the South Summit, because the clients had to wait, regardless, to receive their third oxygen cannisters before continuing to the summit.
Tracy is wrong. He conspicuously fails to mention the obvious reason Sherpas were slow to arrive at the South Summit with the oxygen cannisters: They were delayed by the traffic jam on the fixed ropes below the South Summit โ a traffic jam that was irrefutably made worse by the failure to fix those ropes in advance.
The Hillary Step is known to be the most problematic bottleneck on the upper mountain. Fixing ropes here should have been initiated at the earliest possible moment to minimize inevitable delays above the South Summit, but this didn't happen. As a consequence, fixing ropes on the Hillary Step used up a significant chunk of very precious time, during which no client was be able to start ascending the Step, even after receiving their third oxygen cannister. Charlotte Fox mentioned this delay in an article she wrote for the 1997 American Alpine Journal:
After waiting for more than an hour the oxygen bottles finally arrived and someone produced just enough rope for Anatoli to fix the Stepโฆ. After more waiting for Anatoli and the Rob Hall "client," Jon Krakauer, to fix the line, the rest of us slowly moved off the South Summit.
Absolutely nobody, not even Michael Tracy, disputes that Rob Hall and Scott Fischer agreed it was important to fix ropes in advance of their clients' arrival at the upper Southeast Ridge and the Hillary Step, and they announced a firm plan to do this. But for reasons that have never been adequately explained, their plan wasn't carried out.
Tracy either misunderstands or misrepresents the profound impact that failing to adhere to this plan had on the delays on the Southeast Ridge and at the Hillary Step. After Boukreev and Beidleman belatedly mobilized to fix ropes on the Step, and then traversed one at a time from the South Summit along the corniced ridge to arrive at the base of the Step, it took Boukreev only about 20 minutes to fix a rope to the top of the Step, after which climbers immediately started ascending that rope. But bottlenecks on Everest are like bottlenecks at traffic lights during rush hour: When 20 cars are stacked up behind a red light, all 20 vehicles don't simultaneously start to move forward at full speed the moment the light turns green. It takes a while for traffic jams to dissipate, whether they occur in crowded cities or on Mount Everest, inevitably extending any delays. And when delays from traffic jams occur above 26,000 feet in the Everest Death Zone, the consequences can be deadly.
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The ethot Musk impregnated apparently blew the story without his go ahead 
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Ashley St. Clair, influencer who claims to have had Muskโs 13th child, reveals life of secrecy after whirlwind romance with โdown to earthโ billionaire https://t.co/dxSKQc85zY pic.twitter.com/yNilJsNd3Z
— New York Post (@nypost) February 15, 2025
Saw people saying the timing on valentine's day couldn't be a coincidence but it really appears so lmao I esp love the obv fake stories she makes up about creepy stalkers.
IDK why these people can't use anon accs FFS.
I mean you could not Just tell them not to tell anyone and even if they do its just a rumour at that point.
His harem procedures sound pretty well set. Wonder if he has a eunuch overseer.
Peak chud literature
The tradition, its blinding
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She is harder (for me) to draw than she looks
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Brock is so cute! Triana is the sleepiest babe!
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