California's Rationalist-Linked Death Cult

Plus: Air traffic control failures that led to a plane crash, "why shit not working" in New York City, and more...

Have you heard about the Zizians? A string of recent killings has been linked to a Vallejo, California, death cult that's connected to the rationalist scene. Sex worker/data scientist Aella has more. I'll attempt an abbreviated summary, drawing from Aella's reporting, a solid SFGate explainer, and an X user named @kenthecowboy_.

In 2022, Curtis Lind, a Vallejo landlord who had been letting folks live on his property in "trailers and containers" was stabbed—allegedly by tenants who had stopped paying rent—with a Samurai sword. Lind shot two of his attackers and killed one of them—31-year-old Emma Borhanian. Two weeks ago, Lind was stabbed to death on his property, just before he was scheduled to testify in the case. On Tuesday, 22-year-old Maximilian Snyder was charged with the murder.

This killing is linked to six other deaths across the country. The suspected killers—the tenants-turned-delinquents who had been living as a cult—are almost all transgender and part of the Berkeley-based rationalist community, following their leader, Jack LaSota (Ziz). Some of them are romantically linked to one another: Snyder, for example, applied for a marriage license in the state of Washington back in November along with girlfriend Teresa Youngblut, the suspect in a Vermont-Canadian border shootout that killed a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

Back in January 2023, 71-year-old Richard Zajko and his 69-year-old wife, Rita, a Pennsylvania couple suspected to be the parents of one of the cultists, were murdered. And all the way back in February 2018, a woman named Maia Pasek killed herself after being in heavy contact with Ziz, and seemingly under her influence (more on that in a second).

The purported cult leader, Ziz, had attended workshops at the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR). In 2019, CFAR reportedly banned both Ziz and another cult member, Gwen, from events; multiple followers started protesting the organization (even alleging transphobia). At an unclear time, possibly several years prior in 2016, Ziz started a blog, advocating "a ruthlessly enforced altruism towards all living creatures, and to follow the principle that it's never valid to surrender" and promoting "the punishment of 'non-good' people, particularly those who are not vegans," per Aella's writeup. The group's members claimed to have invented things like "unihemispheric sleep" (UHS), "a form of sleep where only one half of the brain rests at a time," per a writer named Apollo Mojave. "Entering UHS requires the sleeper to be exhausted, it also has disorienting effects so they are not quite themselves. The Zizians exploit this state to convince the unwary that they are actually two people. Ziz believes themselves to be 'double good', and almost without exception tells the people she is recruiting that they are 'single good'. By doing this Ziz establishes a relationship of moral superiority over her followers." (Pasek reportedly killed herself after UHS experiences.)

A February 2023 post from the rationalist blog LessWrong warned of this cult and possible violence, and many members of the rationalist community have made clear that the Zizians have long been unhinged and disturbed. "Ziz preaches a doctrine of radical high-tech veganism that promotes punishing your ideological enemies," concludes Mojave. "She rejects the idea of 'niceness, community, and civilization' that's often at the core of Effective Altruism and AI safety movement member concerns."

At various points, different Zizians have faked their own deaths, but the majority appear to be at large. "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," writes Aella.

Air traffic control failures: The accident on Wednesday night, in which a Black Hawk helicopter crashed into an American Airlines flight attempting to land at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, resulted in 67 casualties—all three people aboard the military helicopter and all 64 people aboard the commercial aircraft. New information emerged yesterday about how air traffic control was short-staffed, with one person covering a job normally done by two people. A supervisor had reportedly allowed one of the controllers to go home sometime before 9:30 p.m., leaving the job to one person alone, who was managing helicopter traffic around the area as well as communicating with planes both landing and taking off.

"Controllers can use different radio frequencies to communicate with pilots flying planes and pilots flying helicopters," reports The New York Times. "While the controller is communicating with pilots of the helicopter and the jet, the two sets of pilots may not be able to hear each other."

"Like most of the country's air traffic control facilities, the tower at Reagan airport has been understaffed for years. The tower there was nearly a third below targeted staff levels, with 19 fully certified controllers as of September 2023, according to the most recent Air Traffic Controller Workforce Plan, an annual report to Congress that contains target and actual staffing levels. The targets set by the F.A.A. and the controllers' union call for 30."

Of course, just because the union said so doesn't mean it's true, but maintaining a certain high standards both for how qualified controllers are, as well as how many there are and for how long they must work, makes sense.

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Scenes from New York: Chi Ossé, a member of the city council (formerly my representative), has started a new series, "Why Shit Not Working," which chronicles the many areas of New York suckage. On the one hand: Yes! True. On the other: You're a member of the city council, shouldn't you be the one empowered to fix it? What exactly are they doing with their time and our money if not tackling the rats in the streets and the crazy people on the subway?

WHY SHIT NOT WORKING: EPISODE 1 pic.twitter.com/X0iHhbEjjT

— Chi Ossé (@OsseChi) January 30, 2025

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QUICK HITS

• New Just Asking Questions episode with Julia Gelatt on the immigration crackdown, current and planned:

• Settlement discussions are underway between President Donald Trump's legal team and CBS's parent company, Paramount, over Trump's lawsuit alleging that CBS deceptively edited an interview with presidential opponent Kamala Harris to make her answer seem more cogent. Paramount is currently working to close a merger with Skydance, and some fears are circulating that the Trump administration could possibly block the deal if he doesn't get a favorable resolution.
• "Progressives please stop lowering standards for minorities. It does not help us. You talk about 'representation,; but if the representative sucks, how exactly are we represented? Ibram Kendi should never have been a thing," writes journalist Zaid Jilani on X in a must-read thread. "This isn't really even Ibram Kendi's fault. He's just taking what they give him. This is the fault of all these paternalistic liberal foundations and major donors who have no standards for anyone and think Ibram Kendi is the best minorities have," he adds. "Frederick Douglass used to write for The Atlantic. Frederick Douglass! From Douglass to Kendi. I'm not sure a greater decline is possible."
• Correct:

I think that Republicans are going to find that while "no trans people in women's sports" was a politically winning issue, "the passport office will seize trans Americans' documents and refuse to issue them a passport under any gender" is not. https://t.co/PlFodjVHT5

— Kelsey Piper (@KelseyTuoc) January 31, 2025

• Awesome ChatGPT applications:

my 3yo has had tons of dental/cavity issues.

we've been taking her to dentists for years, and they have spent an awful lot of time not even subtly intimating that @selentelechia is a shitty mom.

tonight i took our case to Dr @ChatGPTapp

what happened next … may surprise you

— eigenrobot (@eigenrobot) January 31, 2025