Eight New News Nuggets

Previous: Four Hours Marinating a Sponge

🍟Welcome back to News on News🍟

We have drank our mint frosty, we have (sorry Ziz) eaten our delicious Cajun crunch chicken sandwich. We are bathed in the soft rustling sounds— of you, our charming & oh-so-stylish studio audience, dipping your fries in your vanilla soft-serve 🙏 We are at peace.

We are able to once more face the sponge of Ezra, which we will scrape for any lingering New News nuggets.

***

Friends, it’s a good thing we’ve dined. The nuggets are few & far between.

First: to the Vallejo box trucks of Emma & Somni— to their “works of art”, or to their “creepy” abodes, whichever the case may be.

We had, previously, seen in the media talk of entire lye-filled *containers*— big enough to dissolve a body in.

These, in Ezra’s telling, get shrunk down to size as lye *jugs*. This we resign to the ¿Dubious News (¿DN) bucket— which has, we assure you, grown big enough to dissolve sensational longreads by the dozen!

Who allegedly saw this lye? We do not know: they are anonymous friends of Curtis Lind (AFOCL). Do we trust these AFOCL? In one version of the story, we do; & in the other version, we think they may be covering up Lind’s attack on the girls.

We may go to our grave knowing no more than this, which is too bad bc we enjoyed the interval of time when we believed firmly that Lind was a sweet, duck-loving, do-gooder of a man 😞 We do not relish speaking ill of the dead. We do not relish making speculative claims abt the dead’s transphobia & aggression.

Mr. Lind, if you are hovering around us rn, we beg you to tip a table, rap on the wall, invade our dreams— anything which will bring us clarity on sad, sad affair.

Until then, into the ¿DN bucket goes the lye— were these earlier journalists hyping up the lye container size (TLCS)? Is our understated Ezra downplaying TLCS? Perhaps these lye containers are an artifact from Wonderland: perhaps they shrink & grow at whim.

***

Moving on to New News 2: Audere, at one point, said to Milo & a friend: “[m]ost things aren’t immoral if done to bad people.”

Audere, we do not want to patronize you, but here we are once again reminded that we are 9 whole years older than you 👵 You are making a sweeping claim w/ no specificity.

For ex., you’re not saying: “if ppl had killed Hitler in XYZ way, that would have been fine, even tho XYZ is generally frowned upon.” By the way, “XYZ” can be both “immoral”— ie, “XYZ” can not conform to commonly-accepted standards of right & wrong— & still, at key intervals, be the right thing to do. There’s no need to make that contingent on the perceived “badness” of your target.

The crucial word there is “COMMONLY”. You, as we know from reading your X, keenly understand that many “commonly-accepted” behaviors yield monstrous results— & that being “unusual” or “beyond-the-pale” doesn’t mean a behavior is not worth doing, or even that it is “wrong” to do.

The point where we fully start to feel like your granny, tho, is this: who is telling you which ppl are “bad”? Has the lord come down & given you special badness-seeing glasses? Has Santa Claus shared his naughty & nice list?

We come back around to the issue of specificity: not to name names, but if you had said, “Michael Vassar and Alice Monday and Anna Salamon have all behaved egregiously”— we would have no problem agreeing w/ you. We have seen their actions; we have been able to evaluate them for ourselves.

We still, btw, do not believe that they are essentially “bad” people— even if we may have wished death on one of them! We, for our part, perceive their souls & their actions in this world to be 2 v. separate things. We believe that all souls are neutral: not inherently good; not inherently bad. Their actions are another matter!

We would have stood up & clapped if you had said: “Even if sthng doesn’t conform to commonly-accepted standards of right & wrong, it can still be okay to do, if done w/ a goal of correcting the harmful actions of others.” On that note, we will let up being your granny. We wish you, Audere, all the best.

***

New News 3 does make us stand up & clap for Audere! They, in 2023, were in a chat called the Ziz Circle, in which they wrote:

I wanna get ziz out of prison. Her friends can pay bail but she needs an address + proof that she can stay at said address.

Why oh why, Audere, were we not invited to the Ziz Circle (ZC)? We would have brought casseroles. We would have brought many seltzer waters. Did our invite get lost in the mail? We hope it did— or we will be forced to bring a cursèd spindle & enchant you + your entire ZC into 100 years of sleep 😴

This, Audere, makes us want to wrap our arm around you & regale you w/ the many wacky schemes we & our gf have cooked up to break Ziz out of prison. We have no bail $, & alas, Ziz has no bail. We are forced to fantasize abt nails on the routes of prison transport vans, & teams of guerillas shepherding the Zizster to an abandoned woodsy cabin 🥲

***

New News #4 puts us again in granny mode:

[Milo] told [a friend] that if [xie] could press a button that would kill all evil people, [xie] would press it. Shocked, [the friend] asked if [Milo] thought they were evil. “On balance of probability, you are,” [Milo] answered. “It would be better if you killed yourself.”

Milo, Milo, Milo! Dear child, what are you talking abt? Have you been peeking at Santa’s list too? Have you received your own pair of badness-spotting specs? More to the point: why would you ever say such a thing to a friend— to anyone? This is no laughing matter. If you really care abt the business of tikkun olam— which we believe you do— then there is one flaw w/ your solution to this world’s brokenness: dead ppl cannot grow*.

*This is, in fact, antithetical to our private woo-woo afterlife beliefs (OPWAB). But we have sworn, for the sake of our credibility among you readers, to keep OPWAB under wraps 🤫

Dead ppl cannot embark on the slow but rewarding slog of reparative justice. They cannot facilitate healing amongst the harmed; they cannot build new conditions where harm is less likely to occur.

Not to pull out a granny aphorism, Milo, but hurt ppl do tend to hurt ppl. Ppl, in this world, will continue getting hurt; we may thus assume they will continue to lash out & make life miserable for others. If you were to press that button, it would lead you down an eternity of whack-a-mole: at no point would your “evil”-eradication be done.

Is this the best use of your precious time & energy? Which hurtful structures lie upstream of these “evil”-doers? Those you could happily spend the rest of your life targeting— & we would all be grateful to you for it.

***

New News #5 is a delightful little tidbit.

Milo, as previously mentioned, moved out of xier parents house— typical behavior from a 20-year-old. Xier parents feared this signaled xie was in a controlling relationship. We are unpleasantly reminded of these details from xier romance w/ Audere, but we truly cannot say whether Milo felt controlled by Audere— just as we cannot say whether, in the absence of Audere, Milo wouldn’t have chosen to spread xier wings & fly the nest anyway.

Nonetheless, Milo’s parents called the counseling center at xier university, which informed them that their child was likely “part of a cult”. Milo somehow got wind of this, & made well-deserved hay out of it in a message to a friend:

Time to do vegan cult activities like putting away the leftovers lol

🤣🤣🤣 Milo, you are a vegan cult jokester after our own heart. Please see here & here for some light joshing on that “radical veganism” angle which the media cannot define, but which it loves to wave in front of us.

***

New News #6 brings us 😮 a real-life pic from Zizianland!

🤫 Make no sudden movements. We see here, in the wild, one of the boxtrucks which Ziz, Milo, Ophelia, Jamie, & Daniel, kept parked outside of their North Carolina AirBNB.

A neighbor had previously told the press that these young ppl “seemed to care for each other a great deal”. At night, they would ramble thru the woods, all holding hands. Another neighbor, via Ezra, gives us a less pastoral impression: she says these young ppl were “very weird looking”: by which she means that they wore all-black 🖤

We hear of Ziz perpetually lugging around a rifle, & we hear of enthusiastic target practice: presumably done by Milo & Ophelia, whose former lives as a university student & high-flying quant trader may have omitted training in the art of popping off.

Ezra grimly lays out the contents of these young ppl’s trucks— some of which are banal:

1. Containers of Soylent

2. Supplements

3. Large tanks of argon gas: this sounds sinister, but light googling has revealed that argon is nontoxic, & is used for welding— which we can readily imagine this crew doing, given the range of electrical equipment they possessed, & given their inability to call a handyman from their hideout.

4. A cutting device: what cutting device? A saw? A chef’s knife? A pair of snips? We, faced w/ Ezra’s vagueness, might as well leap to the conclusion that this was a metal cutting device: perhaps used alongside their argon gas for various techy projects. Recall that Ziz *almost* got a graduate degree in electrical engineering, before Anna Salamon urged her to drop out.

5. A black metal facemask: this again sounds excitingly risqué— but, on closer inspection, may just be more welding equipment.

6. Boxes of surgical masks: this is 2024-25. Who among us does not own boxes of surgical masks?

Some of which is less banal:

7. Receipts from chemical supply companies: 😮 showing what? Ezra again does not say. Oh well!

8. An order slip for a rongeur— a surgical device used for cutting bone or dense tissue. This, seeing as they also owned a stretcher, makes us think they may have been preparing for one of them to get non-fatally wounded, in which case they may have envisioned removing the bullet.

Our consult w/ Chat on this point has taught us that doctors *don’t* rlly like to remove bullets, & that a rongeur would be a gruesomely imprecise tool to use anyway 🤷🏻‍♀️ We are no trauma surgeon. Neither were they. We are all out of our depths here, & will say only that rongeurs can also be used to cut soft metals— say, for welding— & can also cut hard plastics & the roots of plants 🌱

9. A respirator. This conjured up visions of:

But, upon squinting at that description, we have realized… there is no description. Again.

KN95 masks are respirators: they are the gold standard against catching Covid. Other respirators are useful in construction & industrial work— like spray-painting or using solvents.

***

& finally: one of these homey possessions (OOTHP)— that is, Ezra’s description of OOTHP— made us tear our hair out:

a book about the Scandinavian resistance movements during WWII, with detailed descriptions of how they poisoned their occupiers’ water supply

By “occupiers”, Ezra means ofc the Nazis. He has followed this book report w/ all his talk of argon gas & face masks. We suspect he is attempting his own Conjuror’s Collage: we suspect he has layered unrelated images & facts, & is hoping we’ll see something that isn’t rlly there.

He may be hoping we’ll see the brewings of a “Zizian” poison plot— which is strange, bc among his litany of “Zizian” possessions, there is no poison, no ingredients for poison, no lab equipment for mixing poison, & no means of distributing this poison. None of these ppl are chemists; none of them, here or anywhere else, have shown any interest in chemistry.

Polite society may clutch their pearls over resistance movements (RM), but reading abt these RM is not actually criminal. As an early act of flirtation, our own gf recommended we read a book called “The Coming Insurrection”, by The Invisible Committee: an excitingly anonymous group (or perhaps single person), which has— fairly or unfairly— become associated w/ an attempt to sabotage the overhead electrical lines of France's nat’l railways. This book gave us much food for thought, & neither we nor our gf have yet to sabotage a single railway electrical line— for better or for worse.

***

We were curious abt which book Ezra might, in his own vaaague way, be referring to. We’ve found 2 possibilities:

A “detailed” & “gripping” account of the Scandinavian resistance’s “daring” attempts to sabotage the Nazis’ heavy water (HW) production— bc the production of HW, whatever that is, was critical to Hitler’s nuclear ambitions.

And:

Which is described as “vivid”, “suspenseful”, & “compelling” “narrative-driven history”.

You, Ezra, are a writer of longreads. You are a writer of narrative nonfiction. You are, just like us, a cult girlie— as your bylines attest to. Do you not enjoy being “gripped” by a tale? Do you not enjoy a “suspenseful” narrative? All we know from your redux of “the Zizians’” possessions is… you could maybe stand to enjoy “detailed” & “vivid” descriptions a little more. But that is okay: we wordsmiths never stop refining our craft; & we humans are, like doomèd ghost ships at sea, each on a never-ending journey of growth & of change 🛳️

***

New News #8 is a downer. It also makes us v. jealous of Ezra, when he tells us proudly:

I obtained the sealed warrant used to search the North Carolina property, which revealed that [federal] agents were investigating [Jamie’s], [Ophelia’s], and [Milo’s] links to a homicide and their “affiliation with a group known as the ‘Zizian’s.’”

First, we would like to save these federal agents lots of time: “the ‘Zizians’” are a fantasy 🙌 They are a boogeyman invoked to scare the children of America. If you say their name 3 times in front of a mirror, they… will still not appear to stab you w/ katanas, shoot you w/ rifles, or even puff argon gas in your face. “The ‘Zizians’” are simply the friends of Ziz. We suppose that makes our friends the Drosselmeyerians. We will make them all t-shirts & business cards accordingly.

Second, we dk if we trust Ezra that the feds are investigating Milo’s & Ophelia’s links to the homicide of (we presume) Jamie’s parents. If they are, we have no doubt this lead will be wrapped up v. quickly ☺️ Neither Milo not Ophelia knew either Jamie or Daniel at the time that Richard & Rita Zajko met their unfortunate ends.

***

This brings us to the end of our New News smorgasbord! We have wrung this sponge of all its gravy. Thank each & every one of you for joining us tn— on your way out, you will note our lobby stand of souvenirs: we have respirators & books on Scandinavian anti-fascists for all!

In 15 mins, we will hold a Q & A in the lounge, where we invite all your Q.s on which bits of Ezra’s sponge most alarmed our palate.

To those who can’t make it: 👋 drive home safe, & every day find new ways to make polite society clutch its pearls 😌

*****

Next: Q & A in the News on News Lounge

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