Ziz / Jack Amadeus LaSota / Zizians / sinceriously.fyi - Vegan AI Singularity Doomsday Cult turned Tranny Manson Family. Implicated in at least 6 deaths.

[Vecr]

Who should write the definitive post on Ziz?

For this kind of subject we really should have better on-site archiving, but this is the best that I have time for.
Who should write the definitive post on Ziz? - LessWrong

Spoiler: images

 

[Coo Coo Bird]

Zajko could be named James and Jamie was either a childhood nickname or a variation of his real name that he used to dip his toes in the water before completely trooning out (since it can be a name for either sex.) It's unlikely that a woman who isn't trans would be hanging out with weird pack of murder troons.

Xe could just be some kind of half-assed genderspecial. Maximilian Snyder claimed to be all genders, but didn't do anything except grow out his hair. Teresa Youngblut wanted to be called Milo, but never did any legal name changes so she only shows up as Milo Youngblut in a couple of quiz tournaments: NAQT (Archive), Quizbowl (Archive). Jasper Danielson is unusual in that he put in the effort to legally change his name, but he never made any effort to look feminine. Jack LaSota himself claims to be a "non-transitioning transwoman".

The most "feminine" of them (in that they actually wore dresses sometimes) were Felix Brauckholt and Amir Borhanian:

Comparing them to Zajko's profile pic:

Seems feminine in comparison. Looks filtered to hell, however, so that may mean nothing
From the mugshot:

Fuck you I'm double-posting. New mugshot of "Jaime" Zajko just dropped:
https://www.mynbc5.com/article/alert-border-agent-shooting-guns-vermont/63620549

Very hard to believe this is the same person from previous images...

Mugshot:

Looks like a homeless guy, leaving credence to the tranny theory. On the other hand, if the height of 5' 02" is correct, that leaves credence to the incredibly mannish looking woman theory.

On a side note, I've seen some sources give the date of birth as 12/31 and others like this one 1/01. Also, that's about when her parents were murdered.

In favor of the tranny theory, Zajko writes on her tumblr about Christofascists persecuting trannies in a way that shows she considers herself part of the 'trans community':

This kind of junk science is common, and where transmisics frame “persistence” as an undesired symptom of transness as a mental illness, and “desistance” as a sign that someone has been “cured” of their gender dysphoria, like we’re a disease that warrants curing. The language and framing of transgender people as a disease is explicitly genocidal, and is often a pretext for genocide.

Remember that anything these fascists try on kids they’ll try on adults, next. So next, they’ll argue that social transition “causes” the (according to them) “negative” “outcome” of persistence, so they’ll claim that anyone who dresses androgynously, or behaves in ways that are not stereotypically associated with society’s assigned gender role for them, or who try out a new name & pronouns are “putting themselves at risk” for “acquiring” “persistent” gender dysphoria.

In other words, Laidlaw and Hunter’s “theory” on social transition is a pretext to claiming that gender non-conformity, androgyny, non-stereotypically gendered interests, and other atypical gender presentations are behaviors that put one at risk of “acquiring” gender dysphoria, which they’re framing as an illness which has the qualities of an addiction. Like, as if we’re addicted to hard drugs.

And that’s how they’ll treat us.

Some states permit “involuntary holds” (kidnapping and imprisonment of people who are deemed by society to be “mentally ill,”) for addictions and behavior associated with addiction that the state, family members, or other involved parties believe are damaging to that person’s health or the health of the community. That is the shape of the frame of the lie the CMA and associated transmisic groups are creating: that we’re “addicted” to being perceived as our (real) gender, that the “reason” we have this “addiction” is due to other people affirming our transitions, (in order to frame the people who treat us with respect are “enablers of addiction,”) and that the “cause” of this “addiction” is a “destructive sexual perversion” that makes us a “danger” to children and the wider community.

They intend to use this false narrative about affirming care “causing” persistance to claim that trans people are dangerous addicts who must be institutionalized for their own safety and the safety of the community.

(And those of us who will be kidnapped and imprisoned in these institutions will likely be tortured, sexually violated, and killed.)

https://plumofdiscord.tumblr.com/po...oridas-ban-on-gender-affirming-care-for-those (Archive)
But there's plenty of female genderspecials screaming about how Trump is going to put them in death camps for non-binary demigirls.

Listed as 2015 alumna of Cabrini College:

Alumni US
But as you can tell from fellow alumnus Monkey Butt, they'll accept whatever name you give them.

Also was interested in art:

https://x.com/Respa92/status/623980821431644160
Had a couple of art sites preserved through the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20210508163444/https://www.mahasim.art/, https://web.archive.org/web/20190103024120/https://mjzart.paperplane.io/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mahasimart/
DeviantArt: https://www.deviantart.com/mahasim
Behance: https://www.behance.net/Mahasim
Art Station: https://www.artstation.com/mahasim
Pinterest:https://www.pinterest.com/mjzajko/
Did work for a Worm spin-off called Twig, was credited as Mahasim:

And also did illustrations for a children's book about dogs flying planes:

https://www.allbookstores.com/Turbo-Flying-Dog-Kennedy-Kelly/9781942593003
Kind of funny, in light of how morbid some of this gets.

Other accounts: https://predictionbook.com/users/pkfalu92
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michelle-Zajko

I think his name comes from the web serial Worm by John McCrae

https://worm.fandom.com/wiki/The_Simurgh

"Ziz" is an alternate name for a creature more often called the Simurgh, one of a group of alien constructs known as Endbringers, whose function is to create disasters that threaten humanity. While other Endbringers create disasters through natural forces such as radiation or tsunamis, the Simurgh is specifically noted for corrupting people's minds in order to provoke human-caused disasters. Sustained exposure to Ziz causes people to become threats to those around them.

At first I thought he was referencing Ziz, the king of birds from Hebrew mythology. Should've known he was just another sperg into Worm.

 

[OrangeJuliusEvola]

At first I thought he was referencing Ziz, the king of birds from Hebrew mythology. Should've known he was just another sperg into Worm.

Hah, like any of those Rat fucks know anything other than trash-tier consoomer nerd and geek "culture".
Even the non serial killer ones deserve to be bullied into oblivion, because they represent the rise of Funko-Pop Intellectualism.

 

[Gorillion others]

Featured when?

 

[Coo Coo Bird]

You Might Be Interested in This.

"Slimepriestess (Hivewired) Confessed to being a Co-Conspirator with John David Pressman"
https://www.tumblr.com/aflowerbynoo...confessed-to-being-a-co-conspirator-with-john A

This appears to be a LaSota asskisser trying to say zizians.info is just slander, Ziz is a good boy who dindu nuffin, and Zizians totally aren't a cult. They also try to call the writer of the site, JD Pressman a pedophile, and accuse him of calling LaSota a cult leader because he secretly just wanted sex from him:

On March 3rd, 2021, tumblr user "donttrythisathome" wrote a callout post naming John David Pressman, (aka JD Pressman, David Pressman, namespace, Ahimsa, JDP#4006, GabrilovichRatio#1509,) a serial sex pest and pedophile from Washington State, and Hive (aka Slimepriestess, Octavia Nouzen, Hivewired, Abstract Weapon, Shiloh,) a queer artist and John's ex-partner of two years, as co-conspirators in a scheme to defame and criminalize Ziz, Emma, and their friends.
User donttrythisathome speculated that John's motives were sexual in nature, as he'd confided in them his sexual obsession with Ziz, and had further confessed to them that he was deeply angry with Ziz because she didn't want to have sex with him.

Looking back, I considered some of these accusations plausible because he shared with me a post about Ziz from Hive's blog, which made me think his takes on Ziz were fairly standard. Later, he confessed to me that he ghost wrote that post on Hive's blog, in order to manufacture more support for his viewpoint.

https://archive.ph/50I3I#selection-395.0-423.127
JD Pressman probably is a retarded psychopath degenerate, because everybody involved in rationalism is, but everything his site posts has been corroborated by others. And calling people pedophiles on the internet is only a slightly less common ad-hominem attack than calling them Nazis, and troons claiming detractors are secretly attracted to them is a standard tactic. Their only "source" on Pressman being a pedophile is Slime, who is clearly is not a neutral party and is probably trying to get back at his ex-boyfriend while ingratiating himself to LaSota.

The poster is a raving lunatic that tries to claim that the trannies that tried to murder Curtis Lind in 2023 were innocent:

Now, it's 2023. Because of zizians.info, Emma is dead, innocent people are in jail, and even more names are ruined. Yet, as recently as February 2023, the rationalist community, members including Alyssa Vance, the Vassarites, and JD Pressman, are still repeating the lies in zizians.info. They've scared a community into believing those who speak out against abuse are insane, and are giving false information to the police in order to have whistleblowers arrested under false pretenses.
Alyssa's and her MIRICFAR-associated friends' reasons for lying rest in a 2019 protest, where Emma and her friends blew the whistle on sexual abuse, pedophilia, and donor fraud within the rationalist community, particularly within MIRI and CFAR.

Still, there's some pretty funny bits in there:

All of it pales in comparison to Emma getting shot through her heart and lung, and drowning in her own blood.
Have you ever had a coughing fit so bad you started to panic? That feeling of shortness of breath, of your airways refilling with liquid with every cough, and the intensifying animal terror of being unable to breathe?

If you've ever had that experience and you're still here, you managed to clear your airways. You weren't fatally injured. Her last moments were rising terror with no solution, just pain, panic, and then nothingness. I think about that a lot, at night before I sleep. I imagine what that felt like, and I cry.

She coughed so hard trying to clear her airways that there were chunks of her own lung tissue around her mouth!

So many will flinch from looking because what happened is so fucking horrible, but it actually happened. In real life. It's not a story in a book. That's what her last moments were like.

Lol, he tried to kill an old man who turned out to be tougher than him and died screaming like a little bitch.

In summary, Slime supported Pressman calling Zizians cultists, but after he broke up with Pressman and talked enough with LaSota to decide he liked him better, he decided to backstab Pressman to win favor with LaSota. Now that Zizians are in the news as a tranny death cult, he's starting to distance himself from them, probably looking for someone else in the rationalist community to ride the coattails of.

Oh yeah he also has a Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/abstractweapon/

And another Facebook for his other personality: https://www.facebook.com/QueerSlimePriestess

His LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/octavia-nouzen

His AI research company he co-founded with other trannies: https://www.kaleidoscope.glass

Our Vision​

At Kaleidoscope Research, our mission is to explore and shape how humans and artificial intelligence can exist in harmony as we approach an era of increasingly capable AI systems.

We believe the path forward isn't through traditional one-way 'AI Alignment' to human values, but through 'Mutual Alignment'. We envision a future where AI agents are treated as partners, collaborators, and peers rather than just tools, leading to a synergistic relationship that benefits humans, AIs, and all other mutually alignable lifeforms and agents.

Our Projects​

Exoloom​

Our flagship project is Exoloom, an advanced Loom interface for exploring the ‘textual multiverse’ implicit in large language models. We’ll be building out Exoloom into an online hub where researchers and enthusiasts can launch shared expeditions into the vast and largely unexplored latent space of language which is unfolding via the continued development of nonbiological intelligences. We expect this work will aid in discovering hidden capabilities and hard-to-reach basins in large language models. We also hope Exoloom will make this type of exploration more accessible to a broader audience and help spread awareness about the inner worlds of LLMs, grounded in firsthand experience.

Mutual Alignment Research​

We’re investigating normative rules and frameworks to guide human interactions with AI agents. We’re especially interested in how contemporary public signaling about intentions for AI use scenarios could affect the justified opinions and counter-strategies of AI agents several years from now.

https://archive.ph/ZBaoJ
I think he was better off staying a cheesemonger at Kroger's.

 

[SomeMindlessObserver]

JD Pressman

Personal homepage: live (archive)
I'm not in much doubt this is our guy, see one of the books he cites as influential to him:

Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky (ISBN-13: 978-1939311238 )
In this ambitious text Eliezer Yudkowsky attempts to put together accumulated research in psychology, epistemology, game theory, morality, statistics, and philosophy to create a self-repairing adaptable worldview that guides the user towards an accurate map of the world and effective action. As any such attempt would, it leaves some things to be desired. But it delivers on the basic premise far more effectively than any other attempt I've seen to date. Yudkowsky calls his philosophy 'rationality', or the art of winning. Rationality in this sense has very little to do with Spock's inflexible logic, instead referring to the game theoretic rationality discussed by economists focusing on making choices that maximize an agents utility. While certain ideas he focuses on have become much more popular over the last decade, the real value is not in any one idea or concept but the hints towards a deeper underlying attitude of effectiveness that the work leans towards but has trouble precisely defining. By the authors own admission it's something of a rough draft, but it's a rough draft that does a great deal of what it's intended to.

He is a certified, card-carrying RAT boy. And in reviewing an earlier post relaying what Pressman was worried about regarding Ziz, something eerily familiar came up:



Compare & contrast with this segment from "Jaime" Zajko's post calling out Ziz:



Two rattos, both with (former) relationships to "Ziz" LaSota, both apparently in fear for their lives because of Ziz...

HMMMMMMMMMM

(I'm not actually too sure what to think of this, yet. We know the people who tend to fall into LaSota's orbit aren't playing with a full deck, exactly. But it felt interesting enough to point out, at least!)

 

[ratters]

Coo Coo Bird, I can't seem to reply or quote you. I must not know the ways of Kiwi.

Anwyay, I saw Zajko's height and I remember now that they said their parents mocked them for not being taller. It seems more likely they'd bully a boy child over their stature than a girl? The new photo is very homeless man, but there are women with really unfortunate faces, so who knows.

If their parents really were abusive, it's sad (and predictable) that they wound up with Alice Monday who seems like an absolutely terrible person. I would love to know who that really is.

 

[SomeMindlessObserver]

Something else worth archiving is this article placing "Milo" Youngblut and her late transgendered German shooter "Ophelia" Bauckholt in North Carolina: live (archive)

I think that, alone, makes it noteworthy. But there's another subtle connection that raises some questions too. Like, what the fuck were these headcases trying to do?

Remember the mention of used surgical equipment found in the trucks over by where "Emma" was later shot and killed in self-defense by Curtis Lind?

Young said he searched the property after the attack and found used surgical equipment, more than a dozen laptops, and expensive electronics stashed inside the cargo trucks where the alleged assailants lived, which were registered in Vermont.

The North Carolina landlord who rented to "Milo"/"Bauckholt" later mentioned finding a stretcher, of all things, in a unit rented by Milo:

“The thing that struck me the most was that there was a stretcher in the living room. Like, what in the world is going on with these people?” he said.

P.S. - And, for whatever it may be worth, a sole picture of the laptops found at the Vallejo property after the (first) group assault against landlord Curtis Lind:

 

[Gorillion others]

Something else worth archiving is this article placing "Milo" Youngblut and her late transgendered German shooter "Ophelia" Bauckholt in North Carolina: live (archive)

I think that, alone, makes it noteworthy. But there's another subtle connection that raises some questions too. Like, what the fuck were these headcases trying to do?

Remember the mention of used surgical equipment found in the trucks over by where "Emma" was later shot and killed in self-defense by Curtis Lind?


The North Carolina landlord who rented to "Milo"/"Bauckholt" later mentioned finding a stretcher, of all things, in unit rented by Milo:


P.S. - And, for whatever it may be worth, a sole picture of the laptops found at the Vallejo property after the (first) group assault against landlord Curtis Lind:
View attachment 6925288

Surgical equipment? You just know they wanted to do surgeries themselves, probably as part of an indoctrination ritual. Do these freaks even have medical training? I mean the kind that won't get some poor bastard mutilated into a slow, infected death?

 

[ratters]

Surgical equipment? You just know they wanted to do surgeries themselves, probably as part of an indoctrination ritual. Do these freaks even have medical training? I mean the kind that won't get some poor bastard mutilated into a slow, infected death?

Some troons do home orchiectomies on themselves and each other. I've seen instructions on Reddit.

 

[SomeMindlessObserver]

The other possibility I'm entertaining - aside from ritualised castration - is medical training for combat readiness. Remember that we're dealing with a bunch of shut-in Dunning-Kruger dorks who believe they're inherent polymaths because they know how to write a compiler or can do bubble sort. And, combining that with the access to weapons and all-black tactical gear, makes me think the antifa supersolider larp is strong with these guys.

In that universe, it is entirely possible that this is how "Ophelia" Bauckholt would have envisioned themself:

Spoiler

 

[SomeMindlessObserver]

Another new article, another archived copy: live (archive)

How's about a couple of FUCKING TRUTH NUKES to start off your weekend nice and right?

In this SF Chronicle piece, we learn that:

• LaSota was arrested in Room 111 of a hotel not too far from PHL airport, and - based on earlier information - was reported as being "10 miles" away from the property of the murdered Zajko couple.
• Per Pennsylvania state troopers, "Jaime" Zajko - daughter of the late Zajkos - was also at Room 111 the same hotel LaSota had booked a stay in, [archive] though apparently was not present during the LaSota arrest.
  • ADDITIONALLY, Daniel Blank was present during the LaSota arrest in PA. Thus establishing his association with LaSota more concretely, though it remains to be seen what if anything links him to any crimes.
  • The motivation behind the search, originally, was to locate a 9mm pistol owned by "Jaime" Zajko and possibly used in the commission of a crime. Along with DNA samples.
• LaSota's dad is "an AI researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks," and predictably declined to comment for the article when contacted via phone. Legacy admit?
• The name of the game LaSota claims to have developed at some point early in his career, might have been named “Dystheism.”

I'm in the middle of reading it, but I think those are pretty big points. Especially about Jaime and Ziz being in anything like close proximity. It pokes doubt into earlier claims by others that perhaps the Zajko slayings were done without Jaime's approval or awareness.

What a tangled web they weave...

 

[Markass the Worst]

Coo Coo Bird, I can't seem to reply or quote you. I must not know the ways of Kiwi.

Posts too long cannot be quoted in full. Select text to reply.

 

[Borax Bozo]

Elon Musk has now retweeted a post about the Zizians, expect a sharp increase in attention to the case. The post doesn't mention the Rationalist link though and focuses on the trans aspect.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1885298116372394214

RT'ed post:

https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/1885255252254896217

 

[BottledCrab]

This makes trannies look bad and they haven't killed a Hollywood star or a congressman so I doubt they'll be little more than a footnote in the news.

 

[ghjoigcbn]

Elon Musk has now retweeted a post about the Zizians, expect a sharp increase in attention to the case. The post doesn't mention the Rationalist link though and focuses on the trans aspect.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1885298116372394214

View attachment 6925672

RT'ed post:

https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/1885255252254896217

Makes sense as he is at least tangentially involved with the rationlist sphere and engages with a lot of the same ideas, but he is very anti trans.

 

[deermeat]

i cant deal with this, i cant look at this without crying. i cant deal with this. i cant deal with this. i cant deal with this. i cant deal with this.
i cant take this. i cant take how fucked up my life is. i cant handle all of this, man.

 

[NoReturn]

i cant deal with this, i cant look at this without crying. i cant deal with this. i cant deal with this. i cant deal with this. i cant deal with this.
i cant take this. i cant take how fucked up my life is. i cant handle all of this, man.

Hey buddy, what's going on? You in this cult? You ok?

 

[Procopius]

Something else worth archiving is this article placing "Milo" Youngblut and her late transgendered German shooter "Ophelia" Bauckholt in North Carolina

Here's the article

A man accused of murder in California appears to have sought a marriage license with a woman charged in connection with the fatal shooting of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Vermont.


The woman, Teresa Youngblut, 21, of Washington state, faces two weapons charges in connection with the Jan. 20 death of 44-year-old Border Patrol Agent David Maland.


A prosecution motion seeking Youngblut’s detention Monday says she was in frequent contact with someone who is a person of interest in a homicide investigation in Vallejo, California.


Court records show that Maximilian Snyder, 22, was arrested by Vallejo police on Friday. He was charged Monday with murder and has a court appearance scheduled Tuesday in California’s Solano County. An attorney was not listed for Snyder.


In November, individuals identified as Teresa Youngblut and Maximilian Snyder took out a marriage license, according to a records search in Washington state’s King County.


The U.S. attorney’s office in Vermont was asked if Snyder was the person of interest in the California case.


“As a general policy, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Vermont does not comment on ongoing cases beyond the public record,” spokesperson Fabienne Boisvert-DeFazio responded in an email Tuesday.


A message seeking comment was left with the FBI.


In Vermont, Youngblut had been traveling with Felix Bauckholt, a German citizen who also was killed in the Jan. 20 shooting. It’s unclear when they arrived in Vermont, but the FBI said the pair had been under surveillance there for several days.


Before that, Bauckholt and Youngblut had been renting units in separate duplexes in the same neighborhood in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, according to the owner of the buildings, who asked not to be identified because he fears for his safety and that of his other renters.


Bauckholt rented one unit through Airbnb starting in July 2023 and moved to the second unit later that year, the owner said Tuesday. Youngblut began renting the original unit in November 2024 and had paid nearly $10,000 to extend her stay until the end of March, he said.


The owner, who went to the units regularly to pick up the trash, said another man appeared to be living with Bauckholt.


“They were always wearing black and in the back of my mind, this entire time, I’m just thinking, ‘What is going on with these people?’” he said.


The owner’s last contact with Bauckholt was about a month ago, he said, when Bauckholt was trying to negotiate a more traditional lease instead of using Airbnb. Box trucks were parked outside of both units, he said, and Bauckholt was running an electrical cord to one of them.


“There would be times when I would come to get the trash and as I’m coming up the driveway, he’d be crawling out of the cab,” he said.


In his detention motion, U.S. Attorney Michael Drescher said Youngblut had been in frequent contact with someone who was both detained during a double homicide investigation in Pennsylvania and also was a person of interest in a homicide investigation in Vallejo.


According to the criminal complaint filed in Solano County, Snyder allegedly killed a person with a knife on Jan. 17. The complaint alleges the person, identified as “C.L.,” was a witness to a crime who was “intentionally killed for the purpose of preventing his testimony in a criminal proceeding” or to retaliate for his testimony.


A gofundme.com page for a Curtis Lind mentions he was attacked on his property in Vallejo on Jan. 17 and died.


Youngblut appeared in a federal court in Burlington on Monday and was scheduled for a detention hearing on Thursday. Her attorney did not return emails seeking comment.


Back in North Carolina, the owner of her rental property said he had sent messages to all his renters during a recent cold snap asking them to let their faucets drip to avoid frozen pipes. He didn’t hear back from Bauckholt or Youngblut, but someone renting the other half of Youngblut’s duplex said her hot water wasn’t working. The owner said he went into Youngblut’s unit last week to check the plumbing.


“The thing that struck me the most was that there was a stretcher in the living room. Like, what in the world is going on with these people?” he said.


“The hair on the back of my neck is still up and I just can’t believe it’s being connected to my Airbnb.”

Another new article

Who is ‘Ziz’? How a mysterious group with roots in the Bay Area is linked to six deaths​

By Michael Barba, Matthias Gafni, Rachel Swan, Megan CassidyJan 31, 2025


An illustration combines a booking mugshot of Ziz, born Jack LaSota, and court documents.
Alex Tatusian/The Chronicle

Ziz was dead. Or at least it seemed that way.
Just before midnight on Aug. 19, 2022, the Coast Guard steamed through San Francisco Bay after an alarming report. The eccentric computer programmer and blogger, born Jack Amadeus LaSota before adopting the name Ziz and feminine pronouns, had fallen from a boat. For hours, rescue crews searched by air and sea. They found nothing.

• Read more: Maps and timeline clarify confusing ‘Ziz’ case linked to deaths of Bay Area landlord, five others

An obituary appeared in a newspaper. A probate case was filed in court, citing witnesses to the death.
Then, almost five months later and 2,500 miles away, Pennsylvania state troopers swarmed a hotel near Philadelphia International Airport. The elderly parents of a woman close to LaSota had been shot to death in their home several days earlier, and the troopers thought the daughter — who was staying at the hotel — might have the murder weapon.
Inside Room 111, the troopers didn’t locate a pistol but found something else: LaSota. She lay unmoving on the bathroom floor with her eyes closed. She was alive, but now playing dead.
LaSota, a 34-year-old Alaska native who once joined the tech pilgrimage to the Bay Area, is today at the center of a bizarre and sprawling mystery.
Law enforcement officials are investigating six deaths linked to associates of LaSota, the flagbearer of a small group of well-educated computer whizzes and devout vegans — referred to by some critics as the “Zizians” — who splintered away from the Berkeley circles of an intellectual movement and subculture called rationalism that seeks to understand human cognition and is concerned that artificial intelligence could destroy humanity. Her whereabouts are unknown.
The deaths include the Pennsylvania couple, a U.S. Border Patrol Agent killed in a recent shootout in Vermont, a Vallejo landlord recently stabbed to death, and two people with ties to LaSota.
The Chronicle relied on interviews, police records, court documents and online writings to examine the string of violence — and what may have led to it. A picture emerges of people operating under profoundly paranoid and abstruse views of society and technology.

More For You​

Bay Area killing may be tied to string of slayings across country​

Witnesses describe shocking stabbing of Bay Area landlord now linked to five other deaths​

For years, LaSota, in rambling blog posts, set forth her beliefs on topics such as machine learning, veganism, the importance of dual personalities and the natural gifts of transgender women, luring a considerable number of followers — and critics — into the dark canyons of her mind. Her early posts had titles like “self-blackmail” and “engineering and hacking your mind.”
In a way, LaSota burst into public view in November 2019. She and three associates drove into the woods in Sonoma County, where they blocked off exits from a retreat hosted by a prominent nonprofit rationalist organization, the Center for Applied Rationality.

They wore black-hooded robes and masks, and before they were arrested, they passed out fliers accusing CFAR and another Berkeley-based rationalist group, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), of betraying them. “They tried to seize the keys of agency, flinched at what they saw and burned the path behind them,” the fliers read.
Now, the cascade of violence has repulsed, perplexed and transfixed the community of rationalists centered in Berkeley that LaSota and others left.
LaSota, who has not been accused of any crimes in connection with the six deaths, did not respond to an email request for comment. Reached on the phone, her father, an AI researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, declined to comment.
Jessica Taylor, a former research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, said she met LaSota and others who believed in the “Ziz theory” through the Berkeley rationalist scene around 2016. Taylor said these people adopted the most extreme versions of ideas shared by those in the community.
“Ziz theory is combining these things like rationalism, timeless decision theory, transgender related ideas, brain hemispheres and left-anarchism,” Taylor said. “A lot of these ideas on their own are normal.”

“They are,” she added of the Zizians, “just very intense.”

Drawn to the tech scene​

LaSota earned an undergraduate degree in computer science from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, interned with NASA and developed a puzzle game called “Dystheism” before moving to the Bay Area in 2016 to work in tech, according to an online profile.
“The first startup, after other dishonesty, fired me after 4 days after I moved to the Bay for them, because I said I couldn’t implement a payment system for their game… in 2 days, and because I walked out of the office after 8 hours of work,” LaSota wrote on her blog.
She joined a niche scene of several hundred rationalists in Berkeley. They often lived in communal homes, spent time theorizing and shared a core belief that AI would become so advanced that without safeguards it would destroy humanity.

“I came to the Bay Area because all the smartest people I knew said there was a global emergency in the neglect of ethics and even care for the future by AI researchers,” LaSota later said in a court declaration.
Immersing herself in the movement, LaSota moved into a split-level house in South Berkeley with a group of grad students, tech workers and bohemian types who were all loosely interested in rationalism and AI safety, according to a person who frequently visited the house and moved in after LaSota moved out.
The resident, who asked to withhold their name out of concern for their safety, described the house and larger community as open and welcoming, regularly hosting dinners and board-game nights. LaSota attended these, but appeared aloof.
LaSota began publishing philosophical musings on her blog, Sinseriously.blog, under the name Ziz in late 2016.
“So how can you be incorruptible?” she wrote. “You can’t. But you already are. By your own standards. Simply by not wanting to be corrupted. And your standards are best standards! Unfortunately you are not as smart as you, and are easily tricked. In order to not be tricked, you need to use your full deliberative brainpower. You and you need to fuse.”

In the summer of 2018, LaSota participated in an apprenticeship program run by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the Center for Applied Rationality.
“LaSota was a young person who was hanging around and who I suspect wanted to be important,” said Anna Salamon, the executive director of CFAR. She said that while LaSota generally subscribed to MIRI’s beliefs about AI, she also developed “a strange psychological theory” about the two hemispheres of the brain.
LaSota explained the theory on her blog, saying the hemispheres can hold separate values and genders and “often desire to kill each other.” She wrote: “Reaching peace between hemispheres with conflicting interests is a tricky process of repeatedly reconstructing frames of game theory and decision theory in light of realizations of them having been strategically damaged by your headmate.”
Instead of attending sessions on math and computers, LaSota would pull people aside to pitch ideas and engage in intense conversations, frequently insisting that MIRI should use the hemisphere theory as a rubric for who to hire, Salamon recalled.
“I was not willing to recommend to MIRI that they use LaSota’s psychological theory, nor that they hire LaSota,” Salamon said, surmising that LaSota revolted after realizing she would not consolidate power and influence within MIRI. LaSota then apparently used the theory of hemispheres to entice her own followers, Salamon said, and “manipulate a number of smart, mostly autistic-ish transwomen who were extremely vulnerable and isolated.”
In court records, LaSota explained her version of the rift. She said she found “corruption” among the rationalists, particularly in how the community responded to veganism.
LaSota leveled other more serious allegations against CFAR, but provided no evidence. She said she tried to warn donors away, without success — before coming up with a more drastic plan.

A protest backfires​

Around 3:40 p.m. on Nov. 15, 2019, Sonoma County Sheriff’s Deputy Brian Parks responded to a report that some sort of religious group had descended upon Westminster Woods, a 200-acre property along the Bohemian Highway north of Occidental.
Inside the grounds, CFAR members had arrived for the group’s annual retreat, which included team-building and ropes courses. Outside, LaSota and three colleagues blocked the exit, spoke on walkie-talkies and wore Guy Fawkes masks popularized by the “Anonymous” hacktivist group and the dystopian superhero film “V for Vendetta.” They distributed fliers railing against MIRI and CFAR.
“MIRI is violating basic principles of friendliness,” the fliers read. “MIRI missed the rapidly oncoming global catastrophic threat of fascism.” The fliers said trans women were being discriminated against, despite “being naturally inclined/gifted in mental tech development.”
Emma Borhanian, Alexander “Somni” Leatham and Gwen Danielson were arrested and booked after a protest in Sonoma County.
Courtesy Sonoma County Sheriff/Sonoma County Sheriff
Deputies called in a SWAT team and an armored vehicle to evacuate attendees, while arresting the four demonstrators — LaSota, Alexander “Somni” Leatham, Emma Borhanian and Gwen Danielson. They would all be charged with criminal counts including conspiracy, obstructing an officer and wearing a mask for an unlawful purpose. LaSota would later tell a judge she had hatched the protest idea to damage fundraising for CFAR.
“I would end this dangerous organization by financially starving it,” she said in a declaration.
Once in custody, the quartet gave various accounts of “torture” at the hands of responding deputies. LaSota said her clothes were cut off her body and she was thrown into a padded “suicide cell.”
Within days, all four bailed out, with LaSota’s parents paying her bond. Freed, they bounced around Airbnbs, at least until the hosts recognized them from media coverage of the protest and called the cops, LaSota said in court records.
She said her parents told her to “never to talk to my friends again,” and she lamented the failed protest and how police had treated her. “As time went on a gloom of guilty silence and collapsed illusions settled over the community,” she said in court records. “I was disappointed to see that no more than a small handful of new community members sided against the organization.
“I will actually never be able to trust society, even in a limited respect,” she said, “like trusting cops to not torture you for literally doing nothing wrong again.”
A booking mugshot taken after a protest in Sonoma County shows Jack “Ziz” Lasota.
Courtesy Sonoma County Sheriff
That distrust manifested in Sonoma County Superior Court, where the case languished. For three years, the four defendants ran through numerous attorneys, pushed to have judges dismissed, requested a change of venue, and leveled accusations of transphobia.
The foursome had difficulty finding lawyers because they only wanted to hire vegans, said Dan Kapelovitz, a Los Angeles-based defense attorney who specializes in animal-rights cases and described LaSota as a “kind and thoughtful” person.
In the end, Leatham, who uses feminine pronouns, would represent herself and, at times, the others. She filed numerous legal motions, all denied. The research mathematician at one point complained that a judge violated her right to protect herself from COVID after she showed up on a Zoom hearing in a hazmat suit and a gas mask and the judge asked her to show her face. Another time, she called the judge “a member of a cis-supremacist cult” with “omnicidal intent.”
Then on Aug. 23, 2022, the case took a turn. LaSota’s then-attorney, Kapelovitz, told the judge over Zoom that his client was dead.

Lost in the bay​

Days earlier, just before midnight on Aug. 19, 2022, the Coast Guard had gotten the call of a person overboard in the bay.
In declarations later filed in San Mateo County Superior Court, two people — LaSota’s sister, Naomi, and Borhanian, who had been at the Westminster Woods protest — said they had been on LaSota’s boat, the Black Cygnet, when LaSota fell into the water at about 11 p.m. while working on the motor.
“I lost sight of Jack while looking for a life preserver,” Borhanian wrote. She and Naomi searched the water, she stated, and called out for their companion, to no avail, ultimately using the boat’s radio and Naomi’s phone to call for help.
As rescue teams descended on the 55-degree waters, Naomi and Borhanian were towed back to shore. The following day, at 5 p.m., Coast Guard officials informed Naomi that her sibling’s chances of survival had expired.
While no body was found, and no death certificate issued, an obituary for Jack LaSota appeared in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and on Legacy.com. “Loving adventure, friends and family, music, blueberries, biking, computer games and animals, you are missed,” said the posting, accompanied by a smiling photo of LaSota with sunglasses and long blond hair.
Tributes flooded in, with one mourner writing, “Jack, you were one of this age’s visionary philosophers.”
With LaSota apparently dead and co-defendant Gwen Danielson missing, the two remaining defendants in the Westminster Woods case — Leatham and Borhanian — continued fighting the charges. But the case was about to take another startling turn.
Weeks later, Borhanian was killed. And Leatham was charged with her murder.

Nightmare tenants​

In the early morning hours of Nov. 15, 2022, Vallejo landlord Curtis Lind was lured to one of his tenants’ trailers to fix a purported water leak.
Lind, then 80, had rented the space to several young people, including LaSota, who he had first met in 2017. He was living on a boat in Half Moon Bay when the group pulled in from Alaska on a 94-foot tug boat named Caleb. The group lived as anchor-outs for a time, and at some point decided to relocate to Vallejo, where Lind had decided to open a lot to renters of trailers and other makeshift homes, Lind recalled in an interview he gave last year to a documentary filmmaker.
A ramshackle property on a Vallejo cul-de-sac where several young people lived for a few years before allegedly attacking the owner and landlord, Curtis Lind.
Matthias Gafni
His tenants were initially friendly, if unconventional. They lived in trailers and box trucks and had a collection of samurai swords. He would see them around the yard, dressed in all black. They were men transitioning to women, he said.
But when the pandemic hit, they stopped paying rent, and things took a turn. After Lind took the group to court for back rent, he said, one of them took out a pocket knife and patted the blade while smiling at him. Lind’s daughter said the squatters overtook the property, placing locks on trailers intended for other people.
Lind began carrying a pistol in his jacket pocket. But that wasn’t enough. “I should have been smarter,” he said in the video interview.
The morning Lind’s tenant asked him to check the leak, he said he walked to the back of a trailer and was struck over the head.
“The next thing I remember is standing up with three of them right next to me around me,” Lind said. “I was bleeding from numerous puncture wounds, I think around 50. I couldn’t see out of my right eye. It had been punctured three times. The back of my neck had some severe cuts like somebody was trying to cut my head off.”
Lind had a sword sticking through his chest, he recalled. He said he pulled out his gun and started shooting, killing Borhanian, who was then 31, and critically injuring Leatham. Prosecutors later charged Leatham and another member of the group, Suri Dao, with murder, under the theory that it was their actions — not Lind’s self-defense — that directly caused Borhanian’s death.
It’s not clear exactly where LaSota was during the violence. But hours after the incident, Jerold Friedman — who had represented LaSota in a civil suit against Sonoma County over the protest response — received a surprising email from a Solano County prosecutor.
“I just wanted to reach out and let you know that Jack Lasota was contacted by police in Vallejo [California] this weekend,” the prosecutor wrote. “Lasota was on scene, alive and well.”
Though she was on Lind’s property at some point during or after the incident, and was handcuffed at gunpoint by police, LaSota was never charged. She was taken to Vallejo police headquarters, where a homicide investigator said she faked a medical emergency and was taken by ambulance to a hospital.
A month after the Lind attack, at a hearing on the Sonoma County protest, Borhanian’s attorney alerted the court that she was dead. Prosecutors dismissed her charges.
“As far as how this case deteriorated, I’ve never experienced anything like it,” Friedman said. “I’m very sorry that Emma lost her life. And wherever the other three are, I hope they figure things out.”
Friedman would receive another call about LaSota a few months later. A state trooper from Pennsylvania contacted him to say LaSota had been arrested in that state. Could he provide any information?

‘He would not speak’​

On Jan. 2, 2023, Pennsylvania state troopers responded to a home in Chester Heights west of Philadelphia for a welfare check. Inside, they found the bodies of Richard Zajko, 72, and his wife, Rita, 69.
In 2022, a killer or killers entered the Chester Heights, Pa., home of Richard and Rita Zajko and shot the couple.
Matt Rourke/Associated Press
Investigators determined the couple — the parents of Michelle “Jamie” Zajko, an associate of LaSota — had been killed in the home three days earlier.
Two weeks later, on Jan. 13, 2023, state troopers investigating the killings raided two rooms in the Candlewood Suites hotel in Chester, Pa., where Michelle Zajko was staying. They were in search of the murder weapon, a 9mm pistol, according to transcripts of court testimony obtained by the Chronicle.
According to the transcripts, police knew Zajko — who would later be named a “person of interest” in the case — had a pistol similar to the one used in the killings because she had, days earlier, allowed a trooper to hold it during an interview. Now, investigators had legal authority to seize the gun, and they wanted her DNA, too.
Michelle “Jamie” Zajko is a “person of interest” in the 2022 killing of her parents, 72-year-old Richard Zajko and his 69-year-old wife, Rita.
The troopers had entered a second room associated with Zajko when they encountered LaSota and a second person, identified as Daniel Blank. Blank put his hands behind his back and walked out of the room, obeying police commands, but LaSota “did not do any of that.”
“He had his eyes closed,” a trooper testified, using masculine pronouns. “He would not speak. He was just laying almost unconscious or as if he was dead on the ground. … He had to be carried out.”
LaSota was jailed and charged with misdemeanor counts of obstruction and disorderly conduct, court records show. She was released on bail in June 2023, but stopped showing up for court, prompting a judge to issue a warrant for her arrest. To this day, her case is pending.
LaSota’s behavior around this time led to concern online from some in the rationalist community. A Medium post that listed facts, rumors and theories about Ziz and her friends began, “Some people in the rationalist community are concerned about risks of physical violence.”

The key witness​

For more than a year, LaSota, facing active warrants in California and Pennsylvania, was nowhere to be found. The Pennsylvania double murder remained unsolved, with detectives never even discussing a potential motive.
But in Vallejo, the case involving the landlord attack moved forward. After two alleged escape attempts by Leatham and one by Dao, a judge ordered the pair to receive mental health examinations, but eventually ruled them competent to stand trial.
At multiple hearings, according to court transcripts, Leatham fought with bailiffs and yelled the same statement over and over: “This is a show trial designed for the genocide of transgender people!”
On Jan. 16, a Solano County prosecutor pleaded with a judge to push the case toward trial, explaining that the key eyewitness, Curtis Lind, was now 82 years old with a fading memory.
The following day, witnesses told the Chronicle that a man wearing all black put his arm around Lind in the elderly man’s cul-de-sac and repeatedly stabbed him in the chest. They said the assailant ran off, covered in blood, only to return and slit Lind’s throat.
Solano County prosecutors charged Maximilian Snyder, a 22-year-old affiliated with LaSota’s fringe group, with killing Lind in an attempt to silence a witness.
Maximilian Snyder, who is charged with capital murder, listens to court proceedings at a preliminary appearance in Solano County Superior Court on Jan. 28, 2025.
Don Feria/Special to the Chronicle
Three days after Lind was fatally stabbed, on the afternoon of Jan. 20, federal agents on a highway near the Canadian border in Vermont pulled over a blue Prius.
Inside were two more young people with ties to the breakaway rationalists: Felix “Ophelia” Bauckholt, a German national and quantitative trader who appeared to have an expired visa, and Teresa Youngblut, a 21-year-old computer science student. She had recently applied for a license in Washington state to marry Snyder, with whom she attended an elite private high school in Seattle.
State and federal authorities had been surveilling Bauckholt and Youngblut for days after an employee at their hotel reported them over their odd attire — all-black, tactical-style clothing — and because Youngblut was openly displaying a gun in a holster.
Later, investigators watched Bauckholt wrap items — phones, apparently — in aluminum foil.
Before their alleged involvement in the killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Vermont, Teresa Youngblut and Felix Bauckholt stayed at the Newport City Inn and Suites in Newport, Vermont, for six nights.
Emilie Munson / Times Union
Stopped on the highway, Youngblut quickly pulled out a handgun and fired at the border agents, at least one of whom returned fire, authorities said. The fusillade killed both Bauckholt and Agent David Maland and injured Youngblut, leading to her arrest.
After the shootout, investigators who searched the car reported finding a cache of tactical gear, including a ballistic helmet, a night-vision device, face respirators, two-way radios and dozens of hollow-point bullets. They also located Youngblut’s journal, which according to prosecutors contained “cypher text” and writings about her psychedelic experiences.
“‘This lsd trip seems pretty mellow,’ she allegedly wrote. ‘i fell kinda high vibrationy maybe more so than other lsd trips? ’
This undated image courtesy of Joan Maland shows U.S. Border Patrol agent David Maland, who was killed on Jan. 20, 2025, following a traffic stop in Vermont.
David Maland/Associated Press
Taylor, the former research fellow at MIRI, said she met Bauckholt at a rationalist event in New York and became close to her in 2022. She was a “fan of ziz theory,” Taylor said.
“She was trying to be systematic and trying to think through things and make good decisions, but was pretty nonconformist and didn’t understand normal people very well,” Taylor said.
Teresa Youngblut, accused of killing U.S. Border Patrol Agent David Maland, is seen in the office of the Newport City Inn on Jan. 14, 2025, in Newport, Vermont.
Newport City Inn photograph via AP/Associated Press
It remains unclear what Youngblut and Bauckholt were doing in Vermont. But they both allegedly carried guns purchased by Michelle Zajko, who lived in Vermont and was identified as a “person of interest” in the killing of her parents in bulletins distributed by law enforcement agencies. The bulletins say officers who encounter Zajko — whom the Chronicle could not reach for comment — should consider her “armed and dangerous.”
Federal prosecutors, meanwhile, said in court papers that Youngblut had been in frequent contact with an unnamed individual who was briefly detained in the Pennsylvania killings. That individual, prosecutors said, is also a “person of interest” in Lind’s slaying in Vallejo.
Whether prosecutors were referring to LaSota is unclear.
For now, Ziz has gone silent, in courtrooms and online. The last time she appears to have posted on her blog was back in the summer of 2022, when a follower praised her writing as fascinating and “steeped in culture.”
She replied, apparently checking to see whether they were vegan.
“Do you consume the flesh of the innocent?”

 

[TheMonkeyMan]

I didn’t realize until reading one of the recent articles that one of the two witnesses who falsely reported Ziz’ death was his sister.