Fascinating thread. Could actually be a , but you know what I mean.

@QuadNarca

@Grue

Forced Unnatural Sex With Wife Not An Offence: High Courthttps://t.co/oBUnPZwtBz pic.twitter.com/tWwuE49Z7j

— NDTV (@ndtv) February 11, 2025

There's DOZENS of people out in the cold....doing something!

https://t.co/ZWIGEllZug

— Aella (@Aella_Girl) January 29, 2025

Some music while you read:

and/or the original:

(ctrl + v):

Zizian Murdercult summary, for those out of the loop

I know a bunch of people who were involved or adjacent, including someone who accidentally got some footage.

The summary below is based on talking to these people, looking at court documents, reading blog posts, etc. (I was also at the protested CFAR reunion and knew Daniel)

More info at the bottom (especially for journ*lists who would like interviews)

Pre-2019

Curtis Lind allows people to live in trailers and containers on his Vallejo, CA property, initially offering affordable housing to artists, woodworkers, and electricians. Over time, some tenants stop paying rent and are later referred to as "The Cult" by neighbors. The cult consists of Ziz (Jack LaSota), Emma Borhanian, Somni (Alexander Leatham), and Gwen Danielson.

Separately, at some point Ziz attends a workshop by CFAR, which is a nonprofit focusing on behavioral psychology and AI.

2019

November 2019: CFAR bans Ziz and Gwen from their alumni reunion, partly due to fears of violence.

November 2019: Ziz, Emma, Somni and Gwen protest at the reunion with accusations of bad decision theory (it's complicated) and transphobia. (All four of them are trans).

The protestors get arrested for blocking entrances (while there are children on the grounds) and wearing Guy Fawkes masks. They're released on bail.

2021

August 2021: Ziz advocates for "airlocking" (a sci-fi term for killing) various people in blog comments and claims many people seek "suicide by Ziz." Ziz runs a blog which appears to be the primary attractor for this community. They claim that people have two hemispheres, and are either non-good, single-good, or double-good (very rare, which Ziz herself is). Ziz advocates for a ruthlessly enforced altruism towards all living creatures, and to follow the principle that it's never valid to surrender. She promotes the punishment of "non-good" people, particularly those who are not vegans.

2022

February 2022: Jamie Zajko, a close friend of Ziz, claims that Ziz threatens to kill Jamie, if Jamie does not kill Jamie's girlfriend and provide proof of it.

April 2022: Gwen Danielson, one of the protestors, stops appearing for court hearings, and their lawyer suggests they have died.

July 2022: A different friend of this group commits suicide and cites ideas from Ziz's blog in their suicide note. Ziz appears to suggest their ideas caused the suicide.

August 2022: Ziz fakes her own death in a boating accident and stops showing up to court hearings. The Coast Guard conducts a search for her, but finds no body. An obituary is released.

November 2022: Emma Borhanian is killed by Curtis Lind during a violent altercation at his Vallejo property. Somni stabs Lind with a sword, and Lind shoots both Somni and Emma. Lind is stabbed dozens of times and loses an eye. Lind's account is that they had been threatening him for some time, and one day requested he come fix a leak. They hit him from behind, and when he woke up they were attempting to cut off his head (he has scarring consistent with this claim). He then shot Emma and Somni in self defense. His friend claims upon entering the trailer afterwards he found surgical equipment and chemicals he believes were intended to dissolve Lind's body. Somni and Suri Dao are arrested. Ziz and Gwen are seen at the scene, alive. It seems likely Gwen had faked their own death earlier to escape court appearances, much as Ziz had.

November 2022: Somni attempts to escape from jail (twice).

2023

January 2, 2023: Richard and Rita Zajko are found dead from homicide in their Pennsylvania home from gunshot wounds. Their daughter Jamie Zajko was associated with Ziz, and we suspect the homicide was an attempt to gain money (several million dollars) from inheritance. Police also suspect Ziz is involved in the murder. Police also suspect Daniel Blank, an associate of Ziz, is involved in the murder. Blank has not been seen since and we suspect he's dead.

January 13, 2023: Ziz is arrested in Pennsylvania for "obstructing administration of law" and "disorderly conduct." Ziz eventually makes bail (in June) and stops showing up to court. We suspect that the arrest was indirectly related the murders, and that the police didn't have enough evidence to make a full charge.

2025

January 17, 2025: Curtis Lind (who was set to serve as the primary witness in his assault case) is stabbed to death outside his Vallejo property. A man named Maximilian Snyder is later arrested for this murder. The previous year, he applied for a marriage license with a woman named Teresa Younblut, who was in contact with Ziz.

January 20, 2025: Teresa Youngblut and a man named Felix Baukholt are stopped while driving by U.S. Border Patrol in Vermont. They end up in a shootout, and Baukholt and a border patrol agent dies. Police find tactical gear, firearms, and burner laptops in the car. According to the police, an unnamed person who purchased the firearms used in this shooting is also a suspect in the Pennsylvania Zajko murders. We think this is likely to be Jamie Zajko, given that the shooting is in the same town that Jamie Zajko has a registered address (Coventry, Vermont).

That's it so far. We still don't know the whereabouts of the people in this story who aren't either dead or in custody, and we sort of expect them to continue doing murders.

1. If you're a journ*list and want to get in contact with people around the community/rationalist scene who knows the people involved, you can fill out this form and your contact info will be shared around our networks

2. My friend, trying to interview Lind about something else, ended up getting a bunch of footage of him talking about the attack. If you're a journ*list or documentarian interested in this footage, please reach out to him here

3. The above timeline is collected from sources the community has accumulated here.

It also has some high-confidence guesses made by people familiar with those involved. Please doublecheck all claims yourself.

(link)

Astronomers have been left red-faced after announcing the discovery of a new near-Earth asteroid — only to realize that the supposed space rock was the remains of Elon Musk's cherry-red Tesla Roadster and its spacesuit-clad driver "Starman."

The misidentified object, which was launched into space on board a SpaceX rocket in 2018, highlights a growing problem in astronomy that could lead to costly errors, researchers say.

On Jan. 2, the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC) added a new object, dubbed 2018 CN41, to its list of near-Earth asteroids. The supposed space rock was identified by an unnamed amateur astronomer in Turkey using years of publicly available data, Astronomy.com reported. However, just 17 hours later, the MPC released an editorial notice retracting the discovery after the citizen scientist realized they had made a mistake.

The Tesla Roadster, which was previously used by Elon Musk, was launched into space on Feb. 6, 2018, as the test payload for the maiden launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. The publicity stunt garnered widespread attention at the time, partly due to Starman — a mannequin in the car's driving seat that was wearing a likely defective spacesuit and "listening" to David Bowie's album "Space Oddity" on loop.

The car and its driver headed toward Mars after escaping Earth's gravity and were supposed to enter a stable orbit around the Red Planet, which raised alarms at the time that it could become a potential Martian "biothreat" if it accidentally crash-landed there. However, the pair overshot their target and instead entered a stable orbit around the sun. Now, it circles the sun and occasionally zooms past Mars.

The Tesla has now completed roughly 4.5 trips around the sun, traveling at roughly 45,000 mph (72,000 km/h), according to whereisroadster.com. This means that the car has now exceeded its initial 36,000-mile warranty around 100,00 times.

However, the car is probably unrecognizable now after being exposed to years of intense radiation from the sun and bombarded by tiny fragments of space rocks, which have likely stripped the outer layers of the car and shredded Starman.

This is not the first time that human-made objects have been mistaken for near-Earth asteroids. The MPC has temporarily listed a number of spacecraft as space rocks over the last two decades — including the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft, NASA's Lucy probe, the joint European-Japanese BepiColombo mission and others — as well as rocket boosters and other debris, according to Astronomy.com.

This type of confusion will also likely increase as more human-made objects are launched into space.

These misidentifications could lead to more false alarms for near-Earth asteroids, which could in turn result in costly errors, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Astronomy.com. "Worst case [scenario], you spend a billion [dollars] launching a space probe to study an asteroid and only realize it's not an asteroid when you get there," he said.

While space agencies and private companies are required to accurately track their products in orbit around Earth, there is currently no legislation that forces them to do the same for spacecraft and debris that escape Earth's gravity, like the Tesla Roadster.

However, "such transparency is essential for promoting space situational awareness, reducing interference between missions, [and] avoiding interference with observations of natural objects," members of the American Astronomical Society warned in a 2024 statement.

I was talking to @PegMeMommy about Valentine's Day. I was telling him about how me and my siblings got our mom flowers and stuff for Valentine's Day. During the conversation he said he had never heard of kids getting their mom something for Valentine's Day, and he doesn't know anyone who does this. For me, this is the opposite: Where I'm from, everyone gets their mother something. Now both of us are wondering which is normal.

Decided to make a poll!

Do you buy your mother something Valentine's Day?

my friend finds basically every girl his age who’s in decent shape attractive. this actually seems like the ideal way to be wired?

— Ava (@noampomsky) February 14, 2025

Turns out, the gender that can reproduce in 30 seconds instead of 9 months is wired to not be very picky when it comes to whom to frick.

!foidmoment !r-slurs

>I understand your concern, and I'm really sorry to hear about your experience. Your point highlights an important issue, and it's one that has been raised by many users and watchdog organizations over the years. Reddit has faced significant criticism for how it has handled problematic content in the past, including "jailbait" subreddits and the sharing of sexualized material related to minors, even if they are in the form of cartoons or anime.

>In 2018, Reddit did take action against some of these problematic communities. They banned a number of subreddits that violated their content policies, including those that contained content related to exploitation or sexualization of minors. However, the issue of moderating such content at scale on a platform as large as Reddit can be very challenging, and not all content is always immediately caught.

>It's also worth noting that in recent years, platforms like Reddit have been pressured more by advocacy groups, lawmakers, and the public to take stronger action against illegal and harmful content. Despite this, instances where harmful content continues to exist or slip through the cracks are unfortunately still part of the broader issue of platform moderation, and there are calls for even stricter policies, enforcement, and transparency in handling these matters.

>When you report illegal content, it's important that those reports are taken seriously. Reddit, as well as other platforms, must comply with legal obligations and remove harmful material, including CSAM, once flagged. If you feel that your reports haven't been appropriately addressed, it's also possible to contact law enforcement or organizations like the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), which work directly with platforms to help address these issues.

>Thank you for speaking out, and I really appreciate your concern for this topic. If you have any further questions or want information on how to escalate reporting or get in touch with advocacy groups, feel free to ask.

https://chatgpt.com/share/67b665d5-bb54-800c-a791-3c9ab919223e

"And, peculiarly, Civ 7 only really covers history up to about 1950. You get planes and tanks, but there are no home computers or helicopters in this tech tree at launch. The final science victory condition is launching the first manned spaceflight – quite a step back from setting up an exoplanet colony"

!physics !ifrickinglovescience

I was banned once from this sub for saying that most men are libertarians. But that's just the way it is

When a majestic lion appears on the road, all vehicles must stop, regardless of one's urgency. This is a strict protocol that everyone travelling through the greater #Gir region must adhere to.

A mature male lion was spotted on the #Bhavnagar #Somnath national highway near… pic.twitter.com/cTBOQ5ndBE

— The Times Of India (@timesofindia) February 19, 2025