Zoom Chron Blog

Last year the CEO of NextDoor, Nirav Tolia, pledged to give his NIMBY app a reboot once Karen usage declined. How would Tolia accomplish this? AI, duh.

The heyday of Nextdoor saw the neighborhood-focused social app thrive as a hub for connections, local recommendations and coordinated responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. But after years of slowing growth and accusations of toxic content, the platform began to falter. Now, returning CEO Nirav Tolia is on a mission to revamp Nextdoor not by restoring it to its former glory, but by pursuing an entirely new path focused on hyperlocal news and A.I. features.

Five months later, local media and local law enforcement are having to deal with this reboot by telling people in Missoula that NO ONE WAS SHOT AT ROSE PARK. The “alert” on NextDoor was a total hallucination.

According to Missoula Police Department public information officer Whitney Bennett, the alert is false. Bennett isn’t sure who runs the “Safety Alerts” profile or where they get their information, but the account is not affiliated with the Missoula Police Department.

The profile that posted the false alert, Safety Alerts, says it is powered by samdesk.io. Samdesk.io, according to their website, offers an AI engine that creates crisis alerts based on public data sets.

While Whitney Bennett, the PIO for Missoula PD, admits she’s clueless about “who runs” the safety alerts, it’s the Top Dog at NextDoor who should be accountable for what his company is doing, but we all know people like this are NEVER held accountable. That’s why they’re always smiling.

Do you think this guy gives a shit about the local news your NIMBY app is feeding you? If you do, you’re retarded, and therefore an ideal customer for Nirav Tolia’s technology and all the local media NextDoor is now contractually bringing to its users:

One of the most striking changes is the prominence of local news in Nextdoor’s feed. For the first time, users will see a “Today’s local news” carousel of headlines from professional outlets at the top of the app. Nextdoor has signed partnerships with over 3,500 local and national news publishers across the U.S., U.K. and Canada – ranging from community papers to larger outlets like Axios and the Toronto Star – to pipe their stories into neighborhood feeds, Nextdoor told TechCrunch. These are not full articles hosted inside Nextdoor, but headlines, snippets and photos that link out to the publishers’ sites. Users can click through for the full story, and even discuss the news in comment threads beneath each item.

Hallucinating incidents of violence that would be crimes were they actually happening isn’t the only problem Missoula is starting to have with AI. At the Public Defender’s office, a liberal political loser by the name of Monica Tranel put her entire office in hot water when she got busted using AI in violation of a new District Court rule I reported on in November.

In response to getting caught, Tranel’s boss, Brian Smith, attempted to play the victim card for this liberal loser attorney:

In a Wednesday interview, Office of Public Defender Division Administrator Brian Smith told the Missoulian the AI-generated language was inadvertently included in an unrelated filing. And he criticized the county attorney’s office for filing a “four-page diatribe about the dangers of AI” instead of working with the defense to correct her mistake.

“That’s not helping the client or the case,” Smith said, “and all you are doing is trying to throw a professional colleague under the bus.”

If Monica Tranel was just a “professional colleague”, maybe Smith would have a point, but Tranel is actually a POLITICAL CANDIDATE, so maybe THAT has something to do with the “four-page diatribe” against her for potentially compromising confidential case information by uploading it.

If true, Brian Smith might want to rethink his high-horse position about what’s good for “clients” of the Public Defender’s Office.

In a response the following week, Ekwall points to that language while alleging Tranel’s filing also included incorrect information and obvious uses of artificial intelligence language.

“It is not plausible on its face that any source other than generative AI would have created such language for a filed version of a brief,” Ekwall wrote.

He wrote the defense’s filing also raised privacy concerns, suggesting confidential criminal justice information and the defendant’s mental health evaluations may have been uploaded to an outside server to generate the legal arguments. Tranel’s filing contained numerous citations that appeared as links to files uploaded to Amazon Web Services.

Smith, with the public defender’s office, pushed back on that criticism. The licensed AI tools his office is allowed to use, he said, utilize a “closed system” that doesn’t retain information inputted by attorneys.

The big problem that Smith can’t acknowledge is this: we aren’t taking about just attorneys here, we’re talking about POLITICAL CANDIDATE attorneys, which Monica Tranel has been for many years, and is again this cycle.

How does a busy public defender find the time to campaign?

Former Democratic congressional candidate and Missoula attorney Monica Tranel this week announced her campaign for the state Legislature.

Tranel is coming off two unsuccessful contests for the western congressional district against Republican Congressman Ryan Zinke in 2024 and 2022. In 2020, she lost a Public Service Commission election against Jennifer Fielder, another Republican.

When you pull back the lens from political losers, like Monica Tranel, and the total joke our criminal “justice” system has become, you might see the science fiction dystopia being put in place on the horizon, in real time. Here’s a sneak peek:

If you have children, especially boys, then this is the type of “face” they might see before getting executed by the machines. It won’t have Scarlett Johansson’s voice, since she can afford lawyers to tell the tech-bros NO, but I’m sure some other “feminine” sounding noises can be assembled for these future trials depicted in the new movie, Mercy.

Since our world is being rapidly reshaped by psychopaths, there will be LOTS of local opportunities to fight back. If you’d like to help a citizen journalist who got a big head start on doing the work of target selection, donate here.

Thanks for reading!

Before I examine what Krambu may or may not do at the Bonner site its considering for a data center, readers should know how Missoula County created specific zoning for these types of developments after a Bitcoin mining operation went south. From the link:

Saying it consumed a “grotesque” amount of energy, Missoula County this week unanimously adopted permanent zoning that regulates where the mining of cryptocurrency can take place, and the type of energy it can use to power the process.

Citing a moral imperative to address the climate crisis, the new regulations require any cryptocurrency mining operation within the county to either purchase or develop enough new renewable energy to offset 100% of its electrical consumption.

It’s also helpful to know the history of the Kerr Dam project and the backstory of how Energy Keepers Inc. came to operate this hydroelectric power source back in 2015, since Energy Keepers publicly denied there was any official deal made with Krambu as of yet.

The meeting last Friday was well attended by Bonner residents and the tension was palpable. When one of the guys pitching this project used the word “exploit” he quickly realized his word choice was a mistake, then brought MORE attention to this mistake by quickly using a different word. Too late.

When the data center pitch shifted to answering questions from the public about this project, many of the questions focused on water, which was good for Krambu, since this was one of the few areas of inquiry where they appeared to have an answer, and the answer was this: don’t worry, there’s new proprietary technology that uses a “closed loop” method of cooling the computing, so water use is no longer a problem. We’ll get back to this issue in a moment.

Other questions asked by the Bonner community had no satisfactory answers, like how much energy would be needed? Krambu couldn’t answer that question because they don’t know (or won’t say) who their prospective clients will be. Other questions were deferred to the role of local government to answer, and one question about the supposed non-existent threat to school kids in the community got ME, the uncouth citizen journalist, to speak up about Targeted Economic Development Districts and the county’s version of the Missoula Redevelopment Agency, which is called the Missoula Development Authority (MDA).

Krambu’s team on Friday DID, however, give me enough narrative tidbits to better understand why Travis Jank seems so happy about his startup’s future prospects, regardless of what happens in Bonner.

Brandon Jank, Travis’ brother, is also in this industry, and I found the Jank brothers, along with Steve Wood (pictured next to Travis in the first image), involved in something called “Archive Infrastructure“, which describes its “hybrid data centers” with jargon above my pay grade:

As I continued poking around Krambu adjacent companies and technologies, like Elkhorn Products, I started getting a better idea of what the Bonner data center might be used for, and the two areas I’m looking at are medical and military. Here’s why.

Dr. Mukesh Prasad hails from the Boston Institute of Sustainability and, after reading his bio info, emphasizes what Steve Wood said himself on Friday–medical seems to be their preferred area of development for prospective clients.

Dr. Prasad obtained his bachelor’s degree, with honors, in Government from Harvard College, with a focus on Economic and Social Policies. Dr. Prasad then went on to The Johns Hopkins College of Medicine where he completed his Doctorate in Medicine. He completed his Otolaryngology and Head & Neck Surgery training at New York Presbyterian and Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospitals, and then joined the Weill Cornell Medical College Faculty, where he currently practices. He also served as Chair of the Weill Cornell General Faculty Council.

Dr. Prasad is active at Harvard University where he served two terms on the Harvard Alumni Association Board of Directors, served as Vice President of the Harvard Asian American Alumni Alliance Board of Directors, and is the Alumni Director on the Harvard South Asian Institute Advisory Council. He has long served the community and was recognized previously by the city for his role in caring for first responders and was named an Honorary Member of both the FDNY and NYPD, one of a handful of surgeons to have shields from both departments. He served as an Advisor to New York City during the onset of COVID in 2020, helping with the city’s initial planning and in 2024 was honored by the Mayor of New York City with a Citation for over 20 years of service. Dr. Prasad is also a Member both of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Geopolitical Advisory Committee, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and serves as a Special Advisor to the US Department of Commerce for the Tech Hubs program. Dr. Prasad is married to BU graduate, Chandni Prasad (Class of 1993), and resides in New York City, where they raised two children.

How interesting is THIS context? Especially when you consider that Harvard is where our own Mayor, Andrea Davis, goes to get her marching orders, while that pernicious Jeffrey Epstein pops up as a generous donor to the Council on Foreign Relations, as reported by legacy media years ago:

A prestigious foreign affairs think tank will direct $350,000 to fight human trafficking after acknowledging it received that amount in donations over the years from accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, announced the funding decision in an email to members that also acknowledged that Epstein had been a council member from 1995 to 2009.

With these data points in mind, it appears Krambu is only two degrees away from Epstein money, maybe three if I’m being generous. Luckily only an unpaid blogger running a puppet Sheriff campaign is writing about Epstein’s connections to Big Sky Country, so Krambu is probably safe from this context getting out.

With Dr. Prasad’s bonafides running the COVID op, and Steve Wood’s professed excitement over medical applications for the data center he’s pitching to Bonner residents, let’s go back to the water question and, according to Krambu’s own website, the Elkhorn Products solution:

Will the “industrial symbiosis mission” include, perhaps, the Navy, and all the amazing WINNING America is doing right now in the Middle East, where the Iran war was been won at least a half-dozen times since it started?

No one will be surprised when I say the answer is a resounding HOORAH!

The Navy connection and Coeur d’Alene base of operations for Krambu makes more sense when you know that Northern Idaho is the home of the Farragut Naval Training Station, while Bonner is in relative proximity to the Bitterroot’s BSL-4 Lab and Missoula-based biotech company, Inimmune, which I’ve written about before and recently noted their new “staff” member:

A biotech company developing next-generation immunotherapies in Missoula appointed a new chief medical officer this week, taking a key step toward further growth.

Inimmune said the appointment of Ferdinand Massari as CMO and Ryan McMillian as head of financial strategy “strengthen the leadership team” and moves the company “toward key milestones and planned expansion into allergic asthma and food allergy.”

While Elkhorn goes onward to Phase II, and Inimmune “moves the company toward key milestones”, the next opportunity for the public to perform their noisy powerlessness to stop the Krambu Data Center project with the usual tactics will occur Wednesday, March 25th, at 3:15pm in the spot where County Commissioners meet inside the Missoula County Courthouse.

The idea I am forming as an alternative will be unveiled soon, and it’s brilliant because someone much smarter than me planted the seed. It’s based on water and using the worst tendencies of local government to imminent domain what they want to control and Tai Chi that shit into a real public benefit.

QUICK UPDATE: I almost forgot to mention that the mean woman who looked like local news anchor, Heidi Meili, once worked at Hanford’s nuclear site in eastern Washington. That data point is relevant to my larger research, and worth considering.

Stay tuned, and thanks for reading!

The Department of Justice in Montana is overseen by Attorney General, Austin Knudsen, pictured above smiling with the Hochhalter family, to the left, and former Detective Guy Baker, to the right. After getting a text yesterday from a LifeGuard Director, I decided to reread the Missoulian article from last September. Notice the careful wording about how there’s been no complaints against the LifeGuard Group…for the last 12 months!

If you read between the lines, what the Department of Justice is admitting here is that, before June of 2024, there apparently WERE complaints against the LifeGuard Group that the DOJ was aware of but, since “safe houses” are not “regulated by the agency”, nothing happened. Ok then.

If the LifeGuard Group was receiving State or Federal money, there might be some actual oversight, but Lowell Hochhalter and family operate thanks in LARGE part to Governor Gianforte’s personal foundation money, which helped them secure the ranch in the Bitterroot where “survivors” are kept in curious isolation on a sprawling property Lowell is trying to expand with drug money.

Think I’m kidding?

Because the LifeGuard Group claims “non-profit” status, they have to fill shit out, and because I have no social life, I spend weekend nights combing through documents in order to specifically wonder how “staff” are getting paid when the only paid staff, at least on paper, appear to be the Hochhalter family.

Without the kind of compensation that most of us require to exist, called MONEY, how are all these people being compensated? Are they getting penance points for past sins? I don’t get it, and it’s just one of many substantive red flags that start accumulating fast when you’re talking about working with alleged survivors of human trafficking, specifically women, which is the only type of survivor the LifeGuard Group seems interested in helping.

Maybe that’s because women love horses, and someone has to take care of those horses as the hard-working Christian saviors do the difficult work of going on Facebook and panhandling true believers for hay money:

Hey, didn’t that Berlin-born banker up in Seeley, who I exposed as being in uncomfortable proximity to the Epstein network, love to ride horses? ANSWER: fuck yeah he did.

Another part of this “non-profit’s” online advocacy entails pimping Jermain Charlo’s pretty face, since the early marketing for this group was DEEPLY tied to all the media our locally famous Detective, Guy Baker, garnered over Jermain’s disappearance, specifically, and the MMIW movement, more generally.

When Detective Baker finally announced his retirement in December after I first confirmed his retirement was imminent last July, I predicted that sometime this year we would get a big break in the Jermain Charlo case. After I made that prediction I found a true-crime piece on Baker where he hinted at the same thing at the very end of the article:

At the episode’s end, Baker told Charlo’s family that he was “very confident” they’d get the resolution they hoped for in the “very near future.”

Yeah, the now “Private Investigator” Guy Baker was recently “very confident” that “resolution” is coming in the “very near future”. It’s an incredible “Bosch” like narrative arc that I am highly suspicious of.

If a conversation with Lowell is being setup, like I was told by one of the unpaid directors who made the offer in a “friendly” text after I said my attempts to get in touch have been ignored, I’m going to be curious about what might be known about “accidental” river deaths, like Joey Thompson’s, and the much lesser known exit of a social worker from her position at the tiny house program run by the Union Gospel Mission.

That last link has a list of most of what I’ve written about Joey Thompson’s case, the young man who went missing in Deep Creek after a bonfire party, then showed up dead on “private” land somewhere down stream, in Mineral County. It’s one of a handful of cases I’ve compiled a perspective on far beyond what’s been reported by legacy media.

Until I get out of the financial hole I helped dig for myself in dogged pursuit of answers to WAY too many questions I now have about many, many things, donations are one way I’ve been scraping by, so click here and help me reach the modest amount I set years ago. Any little bit helps.

Thanks for reading!

If you have never heard a man of God admit, from the pulpit, to a group of “Christians”, that he sometimes begs God to kill his enemies, then click this link. In just a minute’s time you will hear Missoula’s 2020 “Chaplain of the year” say “There are people in my life I’ve begged God to end their life.” Think I’m kidding? Watch the clip. It’s disturbing.

For a more “official” narrative about the type of Christian man Lowell Hochhalter is, here’s some bio info from the link distinguishing this man of God as the best Chaplain in Zoom Town:

Chaplain Lowell Hochhalter has been with the Missoula County Sheriffs Office since 2015 and is a vital component to our operation. Our law enforcement community has endured its share of critical and traumatic incidents over the past 4 years and we’ve kept Lowell quite busy. He is the calming voice of reason and counsel when things haven’t gone well and, simply put, doesn’t miss an opportunity to help our deputies get through the tough times.

If Lowell Hochhalter is your “calming voice of reason” then I think we’ve had a serious problem at the Sheriff’s Office going back to at least 2015.

Last September I wrote a post titled “What Did United Way’s Susan Hay Patrick Know About The LifeGuard Group And When Did She Know It?” Then, this year, I wrote this post about Epstein donating to the Virgin Islands United Way and this post about Susan Hay Patrick’s “non-profit” career. Then, yesterday, I got this in my inbox:

Here was my reaction, as interpreted by a 90’s sitcom character anyone my age will immediately recognize:

While I can’t conclusively prove my unpaid citizen journalism was the main catalyst driving Susan Hay Patrick’s retirement decision, I do like sometimes pointing out things that ARE easily provable, like my official role in difficult community conversations about homelessness that included the local business community, local law enforcement, and faith communities.

To prove this claim, here’s an excerpt from a meeting of the Downtown Business Improvement District, where I gave an update about the homeless program I helped establish:

When I read stuff like this I remember that I was a very different person in 2011. Now, after years of lawfare that I’m refusing to be quiet about, I’m in a pretty precarious financial position, one that could be briefly improved upon were Mr. Cognizant actually cognizant of the opportunity he’s squandering behind the scenes.

It’s funny how things are unfolding for me right now; not “ha ha” funny, but totally-fucking-absurd funny. For example, after dealing with actual paternal bullshit with Mr. Cognizant, I awoke this morning to news that Chuck Norris, the man a delusional woman who stalked me CLAIMED was my father, was dead. I even wrote about this insane woman who targeted me BECAUSE OF my work at the homeless shelter, writing dozens of letters that eventually started arriving at my home address, where I used to live with my family at the time.

This is the kind of shit I was dealing with in my naive effort to help improve this terminally retarded community:

I hope this post serves as a reminder to those who still have to deal with me and all my problems that I wasn’t always like I am now. That said, I still carefully crop certain images to protect certain people, and I’m even sitting on info about a certain race-baiter because the maternal side of my marble negotiations asked me to.

How much I write in the near-future is up to them.

Thanks for reading!

A guy named Leslie Epstein wrote this book and, when the hive-mind of online sleuths found it, I didn’t believe it. First published in 1979, this is the summary of the “novel” from Amazon:

Before getting to the insane excerpts I found, I’m going to contextualize what obtaining this book represents, then I’m going to list all the posts about the Epstein network I’ve written since the latest dump of demoralizing data points that no lone researcher can handle, leading some to throw massive tantrums in private conversations about the pain of relative obscurity while simultaneously having incredible insights into how power functions in Big Sky Country.

Getting a hard copy of this absurd book title is like going directly to physical locations as a “citizen journalist” in order to find, document, and try to contextualize stuffed Unicorns at an abandoned homeless encampment in the same geographical area a body was found four months ago and still hasn’t been identified. Getting a hard copy means determining, for myself, where to start with understanding what might be going on here, starting with what funded the creation of this “story” in the first place:

The Guggenheim family was once one of the wealthiest families in the world and their patriarch, Meyer Guggenheim, came from Switzerland. Other locations relevant to the family include Denver and Colorado Springs. Interesting.

To date (3/19) these are the posts I’ve written about the Epstein network, starting with a post that predates the latest release of files because it’s about the PayPal Mafia hanging out north of Missoula, at Paws Up Ranch, which is very relevant.

“Was There A Paws Up PayPal Mafia Summit North Of Missoula?” – (June 9th, 2025)

“Jeffrey Epstein, Elon Musk, Sultan Sulayem, And Missoula’s Probation And Parole” – (February 3rd, 2026)

“What If It’s NOT A Blackmail Network?” (February 9th, 2026)

“Klaus von Stutterheim Day: How A Berlin-Born New York Transplant Connects Big Sky Democrats To Jeffrey Epstein” – (February 16th, 2026)

“Globalist Missoula And Philanthropic Epstein” (February 24th, 2026)

“Montana War Whores And Epstein’s Lego Man” (March 2nd, 2026)

“Is This Why Gavin de Becker Knows So Much About Jeffrey Epstein?” (March 3rd, 2026)

“Does Seth Bodnar Need To Explain His Jim Messina/Jeffrey Epstein Connection?” (March 11th, 2026)

“Jeffrey Epstein, Rahman Hosain’s Bankrupt Jawbone, And The Yellowstone Club” (March 16th, 2026)

“The Post-Epstein Era Of Combatting Human Trafficking In Montana” (March 17th, 2026)

With all these real-life connections being made, what are we to make of “fiction” like what you’re about to read, funded by Guggenheim money and penned by a man named Epstein?

Pretty crazy, yes, but you’re only reading this because I’m crazy enough to keep hitting the “publish” button like Charlie Day in that scene from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia reaching for the cheese over and over again despite getting shocked.

If you’d like to help me feel less like a dumbass getting shocked for no good reason, donate some cheese to my GoFundMe page. One of my expenses for an upcoming post is the police report from the church I’m trespassed from, which the cop shop charges $7 whole dollars for, but trust me when I say that cost will be worth it.

I really hate panhandling for donations, but until I start getting some wider attention for the work I’m doing, my reality is that local lawfare is a VERY effective means of shutting someone up. Some of the lawyers I’ve reached out for legal help include Quentin Rhoades and Matthew Monforton, both supposed legal combatants in the culture war, but for me, with a clear shot at legally taking out nasty bitches like Ellie Boldman, their cojones become little raisins. Sad.

One more link before I wrap this up, and this one is VERY important because Nick Bryant is one of the few people I trust to make an effort at Epstein Justice a real effort and NOT just some limited hangout to keep controlling the scope of the narrative contained. Bryant wrote extensively about the Franklin Scandal long before anyone knew the name Jeffrey Epstein, and it’s his work that allowed me to write this brief post about “Pizzagate” ten years ago.

Hopefully Nick Bryant and his team are more responsive to my outreach efforts than the podcasters I keep reaching out to have been.

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for reading!