T to S and S to L = sex is the drive of life, testosterone is the drive of sex

Here are two articles on testosterone:

Apr 30, 2025 web archive: Testosterone gave me my life back

Oct 22, 2025 web archive: Testosterone is giving women back their sex drive

Just as estrogen is a crucial hormone for men, testosterone is an important hormone for women, instrumental in the development of bones, muscles and sexual function. Testosterone peaks in women in their late teens and early 20s, then declines over time, so that by age 60, their levels have fallen by about half. (Men start out in young adulthood with 10 times the testosterone of women, and their levels diminish much less steeply over time.)

HRT = hormone replacement therapy,

TRT = testosterone replacement treatment,

hormone imbalance, hormone disorders

To be specific, they say “religious communities that strongly oppose gender-affirming care”, but what they mean is “religious communities that strongly oppose gender-affirming care for trans people”. Because they’re bigots.

My blood test showed low testosterone: GoodRx for about $160/year

It’s pretty wild how dependent older women are on hormone replacement therapy and how little awareness there seems to be that HRT getting banned for trans people may very well have the side effect that it’s banned, or at least harder to get and/or more expensive, for us old ladies too.

It’s never about what anyone does, it’s only about who is doing it Frank Wilhoit commented on Conservatism March 22, 2018: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.

Noam Chomsky: In the US, there is basically one party - the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to these policies. As is most of the population.

Politics is nothing but maintaining order. “There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc. There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.” Or phrase it in another way: the constant struggle is new order versus old order or new money versus old money, and it is always order vs. anti-order just like conservatism vs. anti-conservatism. The essence of politics is the normalization of new money from old money or new money into old money. Whatever new materials, whatever new technologies, they are just new outlets for old money.

  • Gresham’s Law: Bad money drives out good 劣币驱逐良币: In economics, Gresham’s law is a monetary principle stating that “bad money drives out good”. For example, if there are two coins in circulation containing metal of different value, which are accepted by law as having similar face value, the more valuable coin based on the inherent value of its component metals will gradually disappear from circulation.

“The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.

So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

Guess the freedom for one group is not freedom but privilege. The freedom for everyone is true freedom.

So Frank Wilhoit 1920-2010 is not Frank above. Read here for the complete comment on 2018 March 21.

World Affairs from the Sidewalks of Life

By: Erik Rittenberry

All of us, thrown into the slaughterhouse
of history, thrown into a world 
of assassinated Caesars
and crucified Christs, 
into a woeful world 
of useless wars and mayhem, a
world one madman away
from nuclear annihilation,
a world of technocratic schemers
and censored truthtellers, a world
where cancer eats the flesh,
inflation eats the earnings,
and progress eats the soul.

I emerge from a dingy dive bar 
on E 4th Street and sit on a 
graffiti-covered bench in the sun
to watch the frantic folks babble on phones
and walk with an unholy detachment
on the sidewalks of an evanescent
empire.

Everything is hectic and zooming by,
fast fast fast,
the great symphony of modernity —
cheap amusements, diversions, billboards of
smiling stooges, steel and cement and wifi,
guns and knives and needles,
conmen, thieves, and murderers,
fat wallets placed in the back pockets
of adderall-souled bigshots looking for the kill...

but hey, I just sit here half-drunk in the
golden afternoon and admire the girls
because the world is ugly
and they’re still pretty in their rustling skirts,
and their lavender smiles make me smile
as they stroll by my saluting eyes.

O America,
what have you done to your 
children, these callous cogs
in a relentless wheel, 
these nervous news-watchers,
these swollen toads of bitterness
and anxiety that wage war on
their own lives. 

This once beautiful land of Whitman
and Emerson now reeks of mediocrity 
and madness.

I say let us burn burn burn 
the hollow creeds and the 
bureaucratic yoke of this
waiver signing society, and let us 
revive the Promethean fire 
of the dead poets who have more 
to offer us than any of these 
wretched talking heads with a 
vested interest in keeping you and I
“adjusted” to the soulless algorithm 
of the status quo. 

Let us burn burn burn
the headlines of treachery
and the flimsy thrones of all these
pallid-hearted politicians, and
let us do away with the life-negating
dogmas and all the
stupidity
corruption
greed
war
murder
and all the childish delusions
that sustain the idiotic inanities
of a belligerent world.

Luckily, my friends, the ravens 
still flutter in the demented wind 
somewhere out there beyond the 
barbwire, and the grass still grows 
in the meadows, and the lilies 
still bloom on sunlit hillsides
despite it all, yet here I am,
sitting in the golden afternoon
on the incomprehensible 
streets of mankind
half-drunk with a 4-day beard
ruminating on nothing valuable,
nothing exceptional,
nothing revolutionary,
just sitting there, alone, in the
feverish gloom of the afternoon
dreaming about pine forests
and jugs of wine
and old trains
slicing through prairies,
quietly awaiting the next 
lavender smile
to pass by.

how to bet in the stock market?

  • 市场是有效的，但并不是任何时候都完全有效，否则市场上就不存在机会
  • 人的自然心理：患得患失。
  • panic：努力避免损失（而不是赚钱）
  • greedy：希望赚得更多（paper money is NOT real）
  • 相对而言长期走势是比短期的变化容易看
  • 没有人能够预见未来，每一次选择都是一次赌博
  • 没有人能够预见最低点和最高点，在考虑交易成本后低买高卖即可
  • 人总会在某个时候出错，没有人能例外
  • 股市赌博不是不犯错，而是正确的时候多过误判的时候，赚的比赔的多
  • 多数时候耐心等待，绝不要期望一夜暴富

Plant the tree and letting time do the work.

In an age of rush, plant the tree. Trees don’t pay off tomorrow. They pay off in a decade. They compound quietly, making everything around them better, shade, value, beauty, longevity. Most products? We treat them like shrubs. Plant twenty features, hope one sticks. Feature bloat dressed up as “innovation.” It’s impatient, and it’s stupid.

The smarter play is restraint. Plant the tree. Solve the one core problem. Put the craft in. Then let time and real user behaviour do the work.

The hardest part isn’t identifying what to build, it’s identifying what not to build.

don’t be clever, don’t be greedy. Pick the thing that matters, do it well, and let evolution beat prediction.

two movies: V for Vendetta (2005) and In Time (2011)

The Matrix (1999) led me to V for Vendatta (2005). Cillian Murphy and “What goes around … Comes around”, the song by Justin Timberlake led me to In Time (2005). Then you realized that the director Andrew Niccol had directed Gattaca (1997) and co-produced The Truman Show (1998).

CHM: oral history on C, Unix, etc by Ken Thompson

As a man thinketh, by James Allen, 1903

The main idea of this self-help book is as follows:

  • “they themselves are makers of themselves.”
  • Each of us is literally what we think. Our character is the complete sum of all our thoughts.

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