Monday, October 12, 2026
The Iran League in both Tacoma and Seattle are under investigation for fraud
- The Whistleblower: Longtime volunteer Corey Orvold exposed questionable self-dealing and allocation of state funds tied to the program. [1]
- The Grant Scheme: Funds meant for minority and housing support were allegedly funneled through the related Tacoma Black Fund with excessive administrative fees and conflict-of-interest awards. [1, 2]
- State Intervention: The Washington State Department of Commerce blocked specific payouts, including a proposed grant to Wilkins Finch's private consultancy, citing clear conflicts of interest. [1]
- Leadership Ouster: After being placed on paid administrative leave, Wilkins Finch was permanently removed from her position by the board. [1, 2]
- Seattle Branch: The Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle faced parallel investigations regarding grant transparency, leading to leadership departures and a severe financial crisis. [1, 2]
- State Response: State agencies and the Attorney General's office faced public criticism from whistleblowers for slow initial responses to complaints regarding how multi-million dollar race-based equity funds were distributed. [1, 2]
New Chinese minivan suffers repeated brake pedal failures as in the pedal snaps off...Chineseium crap
Huawei-JAC’s Maextro V800 faces safety scrutiny following brake pedal failure reports
The Maextro V800, a luxury MPV from Huawei and JAC with a top trim price of 1.016 million yuan (149,700 USD), has become the subject of intense safety scrutiny after reports of brake pedal failure during emergency braking tests.
According to a video report released today by Dongchedi, one of the major auto media outlets in China, three separate, low-mileage Maextro V800 units experienced complete brake pedal bracket fractures during 100 km/h to 0 km/h emergency braking tests conducted on a closed course.
Testing findings
The failure occurred consistently across all three test vehicles:
- Vehicle 1: Failed on the 3rd attempt.
- Vehicle 2: Failed on the 4th attempt.
- Vehicle 3 (New purchase): Failed on the 2nd full-force braking attempt.
Data from pedal force sensors indicated that while the maximum force recorded prior to failure reached 4,589 N, the third vehicle snapped at a reading of 1,612 N. Testers noted that this figure is dangerously close to the national standard, which requires brake pedals to withstand 2,000 N for 5 seconds without failure.
Technical analysis
Preliminary analysis suggests potential structural weaknesses in the pedal assembly:
- Design geometry: The centre of the brake pedal is approximately 130 mm from the pivot axis – a distance noted as relatively long compared to benchmark models.
- Structural support: The pivot area features only a single layer of vertical support, whereas similar models from the same supplier utilise two to three reinforced layers.
- Material integrity: Inspection of the fractured components revealed weld marks in high-stress areas, alongside thin material thickness and insufficient reinforcement ribs, which may contribute to localised structural failure.
Safety implications
The fracture results in a total loss of foot-brake functionality, forcing the vehicle to rely on the “P” (Park) gear for emergency deceleration. Testing showed that this limitation extended the stopping distance from approximately 38 meters to roughly 140 meters. The Maextro V800 user manual explicitly states that the “P” gear emergency brake is intended for deceleration and cannot fully replace conventional braking, highlighting a significant risk of loss of vehicle control.
Brand Response
As of now, Maextro and its manufacturing partner, JAC Motors, have not issued a formal statement or investigation conclusion regarding the incident.
The Maextro V800, priced between 766,000 yuan (114,300 USD) and 1,016,000 yuan (151,600 USD), is marketed as a luxury MPV equipped with the Huawei Tuling Longxing platform, an 800V fully active suspension, and the Qiankun ADS 5.0 intelligent driving system. The vehicle has been heavily promoted for its “full-link redundancy” across eight major systems, including braking and steering.
"It Comes Down To The Parents": Teacher Breaks Down As Only 1 Of 34 Students Passes
"It Comes Down To The Parents": Teacher Breaks Down As Only 1 Of 34 Students Passes
Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,
A distraught elementary school teacher has described a class of 34 students in which only one child passed, with many unable to correctly copy a simple word written on the board.
Educators say the pattern reflects a broader failure by parents to instill basic discipline and listening skills, leaving teachers unable to teach.
National test scores show the academic slide has accelerated. Twelfth-grade reading and math results on the 2024 Nation's Report Card reached historic lows, while teachers report worsening student behavior that they largely attribute to home environments shaped by social media, low-effort entertainment, and, in some cases, the norms of the surrounding community.
The teacher said she has reached the point of questioning her own methods after watching children repeatedly fail at the most basic tasks. "I literally put the word on the board. I write it on the board and I say copy it, and they're copying it wrong - it's almost scary because you're like, dude - then you start questioning yourself. You're like, is it me? Like, what? - I'm exhausted," she said.
She added, "I'm exhausted - like, there's some days that I like doing it, but man, to do that every single day it's exhausting - Breaks my heart."
She identified the source of the problem outside the classroom. Parents, she indicated, are not reinforcing the skills or expectations required for school.
The 2024 NAEP results document the wider trend. Average 12th-grade reading scores were the lowest since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of seniors scored below the basic level - the highest share ever recorded - meaning they could not locate straightforward details in a text.
In math, the average score was the lowest since 2005, and 45 percent of seniors scored below basic, also a record high. Only 22 percent reached the proficient level in math.
NCES Acting Commissioner Matthew Soldner described the findings as "sobering," noting "significant declines in achievement among our lowest-performing students" and "a larger percentage of students scoring below the NAEP Basic achievement level in mathematics and reading than in any previous assessment."
PISA 2025 results for 15-year-olds showed a 14-point drop in U.S. reading scores since 2022, placing them near a 25-year low. The gap between the highest- and lowest-performing American students in reading ranked among the widest internationally.
Survey data from the EdWeek Research Center align with the teacher's account. Of more than 5,800 teachers surveyed, 35 percent said student behavior was "a lot worse" than the year before. Sixty-four percent reported that behavior had worsened over the past year.
Fifty-eight percent said parents need instruction on how to teach children to behave appropriately in school, and more than half favored limits on parents' ability to block or reverse disciplinary consequences.
One middle-school teacher stated: "the number one problem, which is arguable pushing a lot of us out of this field, is that parents are just not parenting anymore." Teachers also report that they can identify which students spend their evenings on tablets by the behavior those students bring to class. "That respect for education is just not there."
When schools attempt to enforce rules, parents frequently intervene. Calls go unanswered or produce confrontation. The result is that children arrive at school without having learned that they must listen or follow directions.
Many have been told they are privileged, that rules do not apply equally to them, and that they have the right to act as they choose. Social media and continuous low-effort content reinforce the same message by rewarding immediate impulse and treating restraint as optional.
In certain communities the pattern begins earlier. Short videos circulating online show very young children already using the gestures and language associated with a high-conflict street culture - finger guns, middle fingers, and open defiance. One post highlighted the dynamic.
Commentator Jeffery Mead observed: "This is very clear evidence of a problematic culture. Black Americans as a whole have a culture problem and our standards are too low. We have to fix the culture."
Body-camera footage released from the January 2023 shooting at Richneck Elementary in Newport News, Virginia, shows the same absence of restraint at an extreme. A 6-year-old boy who had just shot his first-grade teacher, Abigail Zwerner, with a 9mm handgun he took from his mother's purse, told officers while being held: "Both y'all want a fucking piece of me, bitch?!" and "Fuck you, bitch." He continued, "If you want a piece of me, come get it on, bitch. I don't care if you call backup. I don't care if I go to jail, bitch," and stated, "I stole that from my mom."
Circuit Court Judge Christopher Papile, in sentencing the mother on a child-neglect conviction, said: "A parent's ultimate and overarching and primary and paramount responsibility is to keep a child safe... Ms. Taylor has abdicated most if not all of these responsibilities."
A federal judge described the case as "a dereliction of duty and responsibility in parenting."
Children do not arrive at these behaviors on their own. They reproduce what is modeled and rewarded at home and in their immediate environment. When parents do not establish elementary discipline or the expectation that adults will be listened to, teachers inherit classrooms they cannot control and students they cannot reach.
The national data already record the cumulative effect. Restoring order requires parents who parent, schools that apply consistent standards, and a culture that treats competence and self-control as non-negotiable rather than optional.
Chaos and a dystopian world are the left's goals...these are very evil people who see violence as their way to perpetual power
Radical wannabe rep Darializa Avila Chevalier just said the quiet part out loud about violent criminals
Inside the trans death cult...high IQ insanity
How Silicon Valley’s AI tech culture gave birth to a trans death cult
It’s a plot a fiction writer might reject as too far-fetched: A group of radical transgender vegans, convinced AI will take over the world, allegedly go on a homicidal spree that leaves eight dead, including a US Border Patrol agent and a key murder trial witness. But the Zizians, as they are called, are quite real. In his new book, “The Zizians: Inside a Trans Death Cult,” investigative reporter Andy Ngo explains the twisted ideology behind the group, and its links to the faddish beliefs of many in Silicon Valley. An excerpt:
In January 2016, Jack LaSota, a 23-year-old aspiring tech entrepreneur from Alaska, headed to Silicon Valley with big dreams.
Before that, he was an engineering student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, researching space weather events. But his passions veered elsewhere: video-game design, rationalism and effective altruism.
One of his creations was titled Dystheism, ancient Greek for “bad god.” It was a puzzle game where players controlled the souls of dead people represented by humanoid, single-horned, faceless creatures with crackled, black-burned flesh. Players navigated lost souls through block-puzzle landscapes of the afterlife.
His pitch: “This game will push your brain to the breaking point, just like your character’s soul.”
Not long after Jack had begun coding Dystheism, his outward appearance began to change. He started wearing a long, hooded black cloak around campus. He would call it a “Sith” robe — the garb of the dark-side warriors in the Star Wars universe — but with the hood pulled forward, he resembled something more ominous.
Jack spent most of 2015 refining the game and applying for jobs in the Bay Area. His blog, Sinceriously, documented this period. He used an image of a purple-tinted, fantasy-style female humanoid spirit as his avatar.
“I moved to the Bay Area for proximity to the tech industry which I considered sort of my destiny,” he wrote. He believed he could “best contribute to saving the world” by donating his income to various causes.
In a 2022 court declaration, he elaborated, “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.”
But life in the Bay Area proved difficult and demoralizing for Jack. He bounced between jobs, being fired or denied contract renewals.
It was during this period that LaSota began to absorb the ideas that have become popular among young tech workers today — beliefs he would warp into his murderous cult.
Jack adopted the alias Ziz, drawn from the fantasy web serial by John McCrae called Worm. He viewed himself as a savior, writing that he was “willing to go to Hell to save everyone else.”
But in the story, Ziz is a winged female monster that poses as benevolent while plotting humanity’s destruction. The abomination uses mass psychological manipulation to turn people homicidal or into walking time bombs who are later destructive.
Rationalism and Effective Altruism
With Jack’s life unraveling, he sought validation in Bay Area rationalist meetups — gatherings of high-IQ tech professionals, many on the autism spectrum, obsessed with abstract questions about artificial intelligence and humanity’s future.
Rationalism — loosely defined as the belief that reason, probability, and evidence can be applied to understand the world and optimize decision-making — functions in Silicon Valley like a secular megachurch, complete with conferences, workshops, social gatherings, internal debates, and even doomsday narratives.
Outsiders struggled to grasp it; insiders believed they were solving humanity’s most urgent problems.
Many young rationalists became involved in the movement through the forum and blog LessWrong, founded in 2009 by rationalist philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky.
By 2022, the forum had grown to thousands of members. They called themselves the “rat community.”
Yudkowsky, born in 1979, is widely regarded as one of the godfathers of contemporary rationalism. Raised in Chicago in an Orthodox Jewish family, he dropped out before starting high school and educated himself. His writings on epistemology, artificial intelligence safety (often called “AI alignment”), and transhumanism are so influential that critics sometimes describe his following as cultlike or quasi-religious.
To devotees — occasionally characterized as groupies — he is known simply as “Yud.”
The Bay Area’s rationalist community was disproportionately composed of STEM brainiacs — professors, engineers, start-up founders. They debated AI and how to save humanity from self-destruction, toggling in the span of a few sentences between Bayesianism, probability theory, timeless decision theory, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology, utilitarianism, and even Harry Potter fan fiction.
Bay Area rationalists were particularly drawn to debates over how to discover truths and how to systematically pursue goals derived from those truths.
For some, that meant earning money. For others, it meant solving intractable problems — poverty, pollution, war, even death.
Many rationalists expended extraordinary energy applying mathematical and probabilistic reasoning to abstract or seemingly trivial problems.
For instance, on EffectiveAltruism.org, the movement’s largest forum, there are more than 3,600 posts about “shrimp welfare.”
“350 billion shrimps are farmed each year,” reads one post. “This is 5x the total number of farmed land animals. Many shrimps reared in aquaculture suffer from conditions which can and should be addressed.”
Some, including high-profile AI tech executives, leaned toward “effective altruism” — the belief that rationality should maximize doing “good,” though how good is defined is subject to much debate.
Transhumanism and Transgenderism
In the Bay Area, technology and money fused into a culture that didn’t recognize limits. Extreme ideas were often rewarded.
For Ziz, he absorbed ideas about world-saving missions and ends-justify-the-means logic. In this atmosphere, concepts that once belonged to science fiction began to feel plausible, even inevitable. Transhumanism was one of them.
Transhumanism is the philosophy that technology can fundamentally improve — even transcend — what it means to be human. This transcendence may occur through genetic engineering, brain implants, “smart” prosthetics, or transgender medicine that alters the endocrine system.
Transhumanism and transgender ideology are distinct but overlapping movements. Trans activists reject the biological-sex reality, arguing that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries allow individuals to transcend the limits of sexed genetics.
One prominent transhumanist leader described as one of the founders of the trans rights movement is American billionaire Martine Rothblatt. Previously named Martin, the biotech entrepreneur helped draft the world’s first “International Bill of Gender Rights” template in the early 1990s.
Rothblatt served as CEO of satellite company GEOStar, cofounded SiriusXM satellite radio, and founded United Therapeutics. At various points in the 2010s, he was among the highest-paid executives in the United States and remains one of the wealthiest individuals in the country.
He also founded and leads the Terasem Movement Foundation, a multimillion-dollar transhumanist nonprofit with a charitable-giving division. In 2011, he authored “From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form.”
Rothblatt also funded an AI robot called Bina48, hoping that his wife, Bina, can live forever.
Rothblatt’s influence — often behind the scenes — has helped drive transgender and transhumanist ideology into law, media, medicine, and technology.
“Since the early 2000s the expansion of the LGB [lesbian, gay, bisexual] acronym to include “TQIA+” [trans, queer, intersex, asexual, plus] has shifted the cultural narrative from one centered on sexual orientation to one focused on deconstructing the biological sex binary,” said Jennifer Bilek, an author and journalist who investigates funding sources behind the gender industry.
“This shift, framed as a human rights movement, is heavily backed by vast financial interests, particularly among oligarchs invested in artificial intelligence, human augmentation, and the future of reproduction.
“Children are being indoctrinated with the idea that their reproductive systems are fluid, interchangeable, and technologically modifiable, paving the way for these systems to be commercialized.”
Ziz wrote that the idea of being trans “surfaced” to him around 2015, but he initially rejected it because it “would interfere with my ability to make money due to discrimination, and destroy too great a chunk of my tiny probability of saving the world.”
By 2016, he had reconsidered.
“Well, I’m a Sith now. I am going to do what I actually want to no matter what,” he wrote. “I really did think of myself as a woman. Despite putting basically no effort into transition, not passing at all.”
He began taking testosterone blockers and estrogen, later reporting “cognitive benefits.”
Over time, Jack’s transition merged with doctrine. He came to believe “transness” itself could be vital to saving the world
The Singularity
Underlying all these belief systems is a darker anxiety — one familiar from science fiction: “the singularity,” the prediction that computers will surpass human intelligence.
Some rationalists fear that advanced AI systems could evolve into a “Singleton,” a single dominant superintelligence controlling the future of humanity.
Not all rationalists view this future with fear. Many see the singularity as a moment of profound possibility — when previously unattainable ambitions could become achievable.
Transhumanist rationalists like Ziz argue that if AI can be aligned with human values, it could eventually unlock technologies allowing people to radically alter their biology — even transcend into new life-forms.
To address the risks, Yudkowsky founded the Berkeley-based Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) in 2000 and 2012, respectively. MIRI’s predecessor, the Singularity Institute, received funding from PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel. In 2023, Yudkowsky authored an open letter in Time magazine warning of end-times danger from AI.
“We are not ready,” he wrote. “We are not on track to be significantly readier in the foreseeable future. If we go ahead on this everyone will die, including children who did not choose this and did not do anything wrong.”
The Zizians
LessWrong, MIRI, CFAR formed the intellectual infrastructure of the Bay Area rationalist movement. Community hubs, such as Berkeley REACH (Rationality and Effective Altruism Community Hub), connected members in real life.
Those online networks attracted gifted, hyperfocused young people. Yet even within this experimental, insular, and competitive environment, Ziz stood apart.
For Ziz, discussion was not enough. Everyone had to be vegan and reject eating or harming all animals; otherwise you were “evil”. Transgender or non-binary people were more advanced and more likely to be part of the vanguard, he believed. Rationalists had to act now to shape AI before the singularity, otherwise the world would be destroyed.
His writings eventually attracted two dozen or so followers across the country — brilliant, mostly transgender, many autistic — all of whom rejected mainstream rationalism in favor of their own radical ideology.
While rationalism and effective altruism often transcended traditional politics — neither clearly left nor right and frequently attracting the apolitical or libertarian — the Zizians found such neutrality intolerable. Instead, they drew from the language of social justice, anarchist thought, and an increasingly simmering desire for vengeance.
The imagery would later feel like foreshadowihttps://nypost.com/2026/10/11/opinion/how-silicon-valleys-ai-tech-culture-gave-birth-to-a-trans-death-cult/
Posts
