Steven

No man is an island. Θεός, Οἰκία, Πάτρις.

[Steven @cryptiz3n]

True wealth is an abundance of the fruits of the Spirit.

[Steven @cryptiz3n]

@bubbleboi Can't wait for them to miniaturize this and deploy it on their robot hunter-killers.

[Steven @cryptiz3n]

Republicans may be retards, but at least they're *my* retards.

[Nadira Ali🇵🇸 @Nadira_ali12]

"The Romans occupied England in the 5th century, so anyone of Roman descent has a historical claim to the land."

It's one of the best sketches I've ever seen, it is so accurate and highlights the situation in Palestine.

[Steven @cryptiz3n]

@thechosenberg Why is the divorce rate so high!?

[Steven @cryptiz3n]

@_jokeocracy @ded_ruckus

[Auron MacIntyre @AuronMacintyre]

If the GOP can’t pass a bill supported by 85% of America while owning the House, Senate, Presidency, and SCOTUS then I think it’s fair to question the entire democratic system

[Steven @cryptiz3n]

@SomeBitchIIKnow That’s vanity

[Steven @cryptiz3n]

@justalexoki Me pitting enemy assistants against each other to find the best answer.

[Steven @cryptiz3n]

@justalexoki Me pitting enemy assistants against each other to find the best answer.

[Steven @cryptiz3n]

@konsevdi @growing_daniel He is clearly highly agentic

[Steven @cryptiz3n]

@Michaelfiore Crape murder

[Steven @cryptiz3n]

@pegobry_en Jumonville Glenn

[Steven @cryptiz3n]

@Cernovich Woke mind virus laying dormant like herpes until conditions are right to reemerge.

[Steven @cryptiz3n]

@DefenderOfBasic Sales/marketing depending on how you plan to GTM

[Steven @cryptiz3n]

Dudes rock.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The neuroscience here is more radical than people realize.

What you’re watching is a hormonal phase transition. Within minutes of skin-to-skin contact with a newborn, a father’s endocrine system starts a cascade that rewires his brain for the next 20 years.

Testosterone drops 34% on average. Gettler’s 2011 landmark study at Notre Dame tracked 624 men and found that the ones who spent 3+ hours per day in direct childcare had the steepest declines. This matters because testosterone and parental sensitivity are inversely correlated. Lower T predicts more responsiveness to infant cues, more physical touch, more synchrony with the child’s emotional states.

Meanwhile, oxytocin surges 33% above non-father baselines. Prolactin spikes. Estradiol rises. These are the same hormones that activate in mothers during pregnancy and breastfeeding. The entire “maternal bonding” cocktail fires in fathers through a different delivery mechanism: proximity and touch.

Here’s where it gets wild. Dr. Pilyoung Kim at the University of Denver scanned fathers’ brains at 2-4 weeks postpartum and again at 12-16 weeks. The regions linked to attachment, empathy, and threat detection showed measurable increases in gray and white matter. The brain physically bulked up in areas responsible for protection and caregiving.

And in mice studies, neurogenesis (new neuron formation) occurred in father brains within days of their pups being born. But only in fathers who stayed in the nest. The ones removed on day one showed zero new neuron growth. Physical contact was the switch.

So the claim about brains being “literally rewired for protection” actually undersells it. The father’s brain grows new tissue. It shifts its entire hormonal architecture from mating optimization to caregiving optimization. The reward circuitry that previously activated for sexual stimuli redirects toward child faces and infant cries.

The biological mechanism for fatherhood is one of the most aggressive neuroplastic events in the adult male lifespan. And it’s entirely dose-dependent: more contact, more holding, more time in proximity = stronger the neural and hormonal shift.

That first hold is a pharmacological event.

[Illimitable Man (IM) @SovereignIM]

If you have a great wife, you can share problems with her, and she will share the load and plan with you. If you do not, you'll have to internally emotionally process and handle things alone, and then once stabilised bring the post-processed version of that handling to her as a plan.

"Great" here then is not so much an ethical judgement in so much as it is an evaluation of capacity, so by great, I really mean: very high functioning.

Lower capacity means a less robust, more collapse prone character, meaning less dependability and thus separation, because the shared struggles that would bond you, are in fact, largely handled alone (as a man) even though she would believe otherwise (that you handled it together).

Full transparency, meaning "to be fully merged" meaning "to share everything with her" requires a certain level of potency from her.

And irrespective of potency, the man still has to be the stabilising pole, because no woman no matter how great she is wants a man she cannot lean on. In fact, the strongest women often long for a man to be the respite they do not have to be strong for, their fantasy: to collapse into him.

So it's not that they need "always be equal in burden", just more the case that: "when there's a real problem, she can rise to the challenge without leaving him to handle most of it alone."

In simple terms: if her system can’t handle the raw signal of a dire problem, he has to pre-process, dilute, and protect her from the full blast by either taking care of it without her knowing, or bringing it to her as a more manageable issue after having grounded himself first.

This means although together, there is always a gap, a distance, a chasm - because it is not two people taking on the world together in the self-flattering way they'd like to think, but a man curating reality for a dependant in the same way a parent would for a child. This may sound unflattering, but it is not the exception - it is the rule.

[Matt Stoller @matthewstoller]

The Jeff Epstein saga isn't a scandal about pedophilia, it's about a Russian word called 'blat,' a Soviet-era word meaning 'the use of personal networks for obtaining goods and services in short supply and for circumventing formal procedures.' It's about a kind of government.

As with the large number of 'blatniks' in the Soviet era who made sure their factories got what they needed outside the formal state procurement process, Epstein greased the wheels for the neoliberal state. His job was governance.

What does that mean? Well it's clear that Epstein was an entrepreneurial broker across multiple public and private bureaucracies, helping organize 'under-the-table' deals among the legal, business, intelligence, and political elites to allow them to escape the rule of law and traditional conflict of interest restrictions. It's statecraft to allow a superclass to systemically escape the formalized rules.

The pedophilia and prostitution were part of it - that is obviously violating the rule of law - but so are the random favors Epstein bestowed. Like Epstein sending Senator Joe Manchin's request for a yacht, a request which came from the First lady of the Virginia Islands, to a random NY financier who might have one. Or working with Joi Ito at MIT and billionaire Reid Hoffman to restructure the Bitcoin Foundation. It's all about matching capital and talent and inputs outside of the restrictions ordinary people are subject to.

This kind of governance is particularly important in Soviet-style states, where everyone knows the rules are fake, where skirting the system IS the system. Epstein and his affiliates thrived because of the weakened institutions of the United States, institutions enfeebled in many cases by the men in his network, like Larry Summers. These men adopted multiple roles - advisor, businessman, academic, board member, regulator - and put on the hat that best maximized their self-interest and the self-interest of their narrow network at that moment.

The old world, where handing someone your business card meant you represented that institution, disappeared in the 1980s. Over the course of the 1990s, neoconservatives, neoliberals, bankers - ultimately Epstein's network - built this new social order. It was one where you couldn't succeed through the formal rules, but if you were let into the networks of trust by blatniks, you could do anything you wanted.

While all the specifics of Epstein's network are not known, and while conspiracy theorists often have crazy views, they have correctly fingered that the world of meritocracy and formalized systems is increasingly a fraud. And that the real government lies elsewhere.

In short, when formal democratic institutions like Congress stop governing, the networks of men like Epstein fill the power vacuum. Epstein built what Roy Cohn always wanted to have, but never achieved, because the then-institutions were too strong for him to break.

Here's a passage from sociologist Janine Wedel's Shadow Elite on how this form of governance works.

[Steven @cryptiz3n]

@1000yearhouse Beautiful

[Steven @cryptiz3n]

Wellness check on Peter Schiff.