CIA admits to government overthrow everybody already knew about. Yay? And of course, the CIA overthrow and support of the Shah leads to the counter-revolution in the seventies, the gas and hostage crises, the Iran-Iraq war [and US picking the Iraqi side] which all generally leads to Gulf Wars I & II. Great job, CIA! You're all fucking geniuses - CIA Admits It Was Behind Iran's Coup - By Malcolm Byrne | Foreign Policy:
"Sixty years ago this Monday, on August 19, 1953, modern Iranian history took a critical turn when a U.S.- and British-backed coup overthrew the country's prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. The event's reverberations have haunted its orchestrators over the years, contributing to the anti-Americanism that accompanied the Shah's ouster in early 1979, and even influencing the Iranians who seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran later that year.
But it has taken almost six decades for the U.S. intelligence community to acknowledge openly that it was behind the controversial overthrow. Published here today -- and on the website of the National Security Archive, which obtained the document through the Freedom of Information Act -- is a brief excerpt from The Battle for Iran, an internal report prepared in the mid-1970s by an in-house CIA historian. The document was first released in 1981, but with most of it excised, including all of Section III, entitled "Covert Action" -- the part that describes the coup itself. Most of that section remains under wraps, but this new version does formally make public, for the first time that we know of, the fact of the agency's participation: "[T]he military coup that overthrew Mosadeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy," the history reads. The risk of leaving Iran "open to Soviet aggression," it adds, "compelled the United States ... in planning and executing TPAJAX.""
Could be an interesting addition to the JFK conspiracy genre.
"Isn’t it totally weird how college quarterbacks seem to score really good-looking girlfriends? It’s quite a coincidence. This is Lindsey Duke, and she canoodles with University of Central Florida's Blake Bortles.
She is easy on the eyes and is comfortable being on camera. What a combination. Don’t you guys just love sports? Sometimes I love sports two times in one day."
LSD, Other Psychedelics Don't Drive You Crazy, New Research Says - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "Read it and weep, creators of crappy old black and white propaganda short films about the mad, mad dangers of psychedelic drugs, from Science Newsline:
The use of LSD, magic mushrooms, or peyote does not increase a person's risk of developing mental health problems, according to an analysis of information from more than 130,000 randomly chosen people, including 22,000 people who had used psychedelics at least once."
"Whether gun-control laws actually produce the desired results is a matter of great dispute. But liberals will happily cherry-pick the data that best make their case. (Why should they be any different?) They will then argue as The New York Times did in 2010, when it denounced a Supreme Court ruling upholding gun rights: “The arguments that led to Monday’s decision,” the newspaper intoned, “were infuriatingly abstract, but the results will be all too real and bloody.”
Translation: Don’t give us any of that airy nonsense about rights. People’s lives are on the line here. This, in essence, was how conservatives reacted last week when a federal judge said New York’s stop-and-frisk tactics were unconstitutional. Stop-and-frisk was “a policy that has saved thousands of black lives,” wrote noted civil-rights icon Ann Coulter. The Wall Street Journal agreed: “If the judge’s ruling isn’t overturned, the victims won’t be in the tony precincts [but] in the barrios and housing projects.” Channeling The Times, Daniel Henninger of The Journal griped that “when liberals weigh the reality of physical threat . . . against hyper-abstract interpretations of constitutional rights, abstraction wins.”"
"We need police to catch murderers, thieves and con men, and so we give them special power -- the power to use force on others. Sadly, today’s police use that power to invade people’s homes over accusations of trivial, nonviolent offenses -- and often do it with tanks, battering rams and armor you’d expect on battlefields.
In his book “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” Radley Balko recounts the rise of police SWAT teams (SWAT stands for Special Weapons And Tactics) armed with heavy military equipment. SWAT raids began as rarely used methods of dealing with violent situations, like hostage-takings. But government always grows. In the 1970s, there were about 300 SWAT raids per year. “As of 2005,” says Balko, “100 to 150 per day.” What began as a few specialized groups of police trained to address genuine threats to safety has degenerated into small armies descending on organic farms where farmers sell unpasteurized milk and legal medical marijuana dispensaries getting raided as if they were heavily armed threats.
The increase began under Nixon-era politicians who wanted to look “tough on crime,” even if that meant exaggerating the threat posed by illegal drugs. As the futile war on drugs escalated, cops worried that drug users would destroy evidence if cops knocked and announced themselves. So they stopped doing that, changing a centuries-old rule that treated citizens’ homes as their castles -- castles whose owners must be presented with a warrant before police can enter. Soon, every police department wanted a SWAT team -- and many were more interested in getting cool military gear than in considering the potential downside -- like terrorizing innocent people, raiding the wrong house and causing violence. “I found over 50 cases where a completely innocent person was killed in one of these raids,” says Balko. Often this happens because the homeowner does not realize who is breaking down his door in the middle of the night..."
"A petition signed by a reported 26,000 veterans and sent to the White House on Tuesday calls for President Obama to fire Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki, saying a change of leadership is needed to eliminate the lengthy backlog of veterans awaiting action on their disability claims. The claims backlog — those cases pending 125 days or longer — stands at 490,000, which is down from the 530,000 reported June 15, figures show. VA says its total claims inventory of 773,000 is the lowest since April 2011, and down from 808,000 on June 15.
It’s pretty fucking disgusting and shameful that our government can find all the money in the world to bail out bankers, but when it’s time to provide care for the people who fought in fucking wars, we’re suddenly broke and can’t do anything about it."
So awesome. Click here if too small to read... SMBC
"We’ve been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we’ve had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life. I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country.
It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized in our efforts to meet this risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity.
We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.
In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror...
As the late Howard Zinn once said, “There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.” I understand that my actions violated the law, and I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intention to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others. If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal. — Statement by Bradley Manning read after his sentancing, by his lawyer David Coombs "
"If we actually had a functioning judicial system and an independent press, Manning would have been a witness for the prosecution against the war criminals he helped expose. He would not have been headed, bound and shackled, to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. His testimony would have ensured that those who waged illegal war, tortured, lied to the public, monitored our electronic communications and ordered the gunning down of unarmed civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen were sent to Fort Leavenworth’s cells. If we had a functioning judiciary the hundreds of rapes and murders Manning made public would be investigated. The officials and generals who lied to us when they said they did not keep a record of civilian dead would be held to account for the 109,032 “violent deaths” in Iraq, including those of 66,081 civilians. The pilots in the “Collateral Murder” video, which showed the helicopter attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad that left nine dead, including two Reuters journalists, would be court-martialed."
The sermon was awkward, to say the least. Pearsons is the eldest daughter of megapastor Kenneth Copeland, and her church is one of the cornerstones of Kenneth Copeland Ministries, his sprawling evangelical empire. He's far from the most vocal proponent of the discredited theory that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine causes autism, but, between his advocacy of faith healing and his promotion of the vaccine-autism link on his online talk show, he's not exactly urging his flock to get their recommended shots."
"Thorough investigations take time, but in this case, at a minimum, the attorney general’s office needs to inform the public about police policies regarding the use of deadly force. “Stop or I’ll shoot,” is not the law of the land. Law enforcement officers may not fire on fleeing suspects, or known criminals for that matter, simply to prevent them from getting away. Deadly force may only be employed when an officer needs to defend him- or herself or a third party from the imminent use of deadly force, or to prevent the escape of someone the officer believes will seriously endanger human life if not apprehended without delay."
"A significant chunk of Louisiana Republicans evidently believe that President Barack Obama is to blame for the poor response to the hurricane that ravaged their state more than three years before he took office. The latest survey from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling, provided exclusively to TPM, showed an eye-popping divide among Republicans in the Bayou State when it comes to accountability for the government's post-Katrina blunders. Twenty-eight percent said they think former President George W. Bush, who was in office at the time, was more responsible for the poor federal response while 29 percent said Obama, who was still a freshman U.S. Senator when the storm battered the Gulf Coast in 2005, was more responsible. Nearly half of Louisiana Republicans — 44 percent — said they aren't sure who to blame."
Don't Fly While Brown, especially during Ramadan. Disgusting. Worth clicking over & reading in full to understand how pointless, surreal and incompetent the American Security State really is...
"I got in line for security at the airport and handed the agent my ID. Another agent came over and handed me a paper slip, which he said was being used to track the length of the security lines. He said, “just hand this to someone when your stuff goes through the x-ray machines, and we’ll know how long you were in line.’ I looked at the timestamp on the paper: 10:40..."
"Actually, really knowing someone doesn’t mean anything. People change. A person may like pineapple today and something else tomorrow." - Chungking Express (1994) - Quotes - IMDb
"The fallout from all of this NSA surveillance will take a very, very long time to measure, but it will be profound. The government, again, has put so much emphasis on the "benefit" of preventing an exceptionally low probability event, that it barely even considers the massive costs on everyone else... The power of a surveillance state to spin out of control has wide-reaching consequences. It's difficult to see how anyone can claim it's worth the costs."
"The usual arguments: the government doesn't care about your emails. If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about. This is about protecting us from terrorist attacks, not about snooping into Americans' communications. Don't you remember 9/11?
I tire of responding to those.
Let me offer one response that applies to all of them: I don't trust my government, I don't trust the people who work for my government, and I believe that the evidence suggests that it's irrational to offer such trust."
"3. When governments say that they are using their powers to fight terrorists, governments are lying. Government actually use their expanded powers to pursue whatever they want, including copyright infringement and the War of Drugs. Therefore it would not surprise me in the least if a nominally anti-terrorist measure were stretched here to accommodate a leak investigation.
4. Governments say that they are using their power to fight terrorists, as if the identity of "terrorists" is a static and principled matter. In fact, who is or isn't a terrorist is a political question resolved in the discretion of the government based on the balance of power at any given time, as I learned to my regret."
"“In America,” he adds, “it is always a paranoid time.”
That’s the core argument of “The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy,” a new cultural history... Walker’s book is a riposte of sorts to the most famous treatment of America’s suspicious fantasies, Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” an essay first published in 1964 and oft cited since. Walker calls Hofstadter’s essay “flawed but fascinating,” and gives Hofstadter credit for the canny observation that the people who battle conspiracies have a tendency to form organizations and initiatives that eerily resemble those of their alleged foes. (Joe McCarthy, meet Joseph Stalin; you two guys have a lot in common.)
But where Walker feels Hofstadter went wrong is in his assertion that “political paranoia is ‘the preferred style only of minority movements’” and that the style has “a greater affinity for bad causes than good.” Au contraire, says Walker. “Educated elites have conspiracy theories, too” and the nation’s long history of “moral panics” illustrates the ways that “influential social institutions” — from the government to churches and political parties to the press — engage in paranoid thinking, sometimes with lethal results...
“I’m not out to espouse or debunk any particular conspiracy theories,” but rather to tease out what they reveal about our collective psyche. This is a tricky brief because, as Walker himself admits, some conspiracy theories — such as the activities of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program to investigate “anti-American” groups in the 1960s and ’70s — are documented, while some of the undocumented ones are more credible than others. “It would be absurd,” he writes, “to deny that conspiracies can be real … The world is filled with plots both petty and grand, though never as enormous as the ancient cabals described in the most baroque conspiracy literature."
...Although conspiracies do exist, we need to be vigilant against our propensity to find them whether they are there or not. The most sensible outlook would appear to be that of Robert Anton Wilson, who concluded that “powerful people” could well be “engaged in criminal plots” but who found it unlikely that “the conspirators were capable of carrying out those plots competently.”"
"Is there anything interesting you learned about Robert Anton Wilson by speaking to his daughter, Christina Pearson, that didn't make it into the book?
WALKER:There's a lot. Actually, one of my regrets about the book is that I have so much material about Wilson -- from that interview and from other sources -- that I didn't use. I could have made that chapter three times as long, and it would have been interesting, but it would have stopped being a segment in a book about American paranoia and started being a biography of Robert Anton Wilson. And while that's a book that absolutely needs to be written someday, it isn't the book I wrote this time.
When I talked with Christina, the portrait of her dad that emerged was one of a devoted husband who was a loving but neglectful parent. Someone who in some ways was a classic absent-minded professor: capable of sharp intellectual insights but unsure what to do when a light bulb broke. Someone who spent half his life striving to establish himself as a writer, who finally had a breakthrough with Illuminatus!, and who promptly had his world fall apart again when one of his daughters was murdered and his son went mad. And someone who was, despite everything that went badly in his life, fundamentally an optimist. "He thought he was going to live forever," Christina told me. "When did he stop thinking that?" I asked. "About 48 hours before he died.""
"In a remarkable post, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger describes how the British government raided the Guardian’s offices in order to destroy hard drives containing information provided by NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil? The man was unmoved. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian’s long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian’s basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents…
Whitehall was satisfied, but it felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age."
"The detention at Heathrow on Sunday of the Brazilian David Miranda is the sort of treatment western politicians love to deplore in Putin's Russia or Ahmadinejad's Iran. His "offence" under the 2000 Terrorism Act was apparently to be the partner of a journalist, Glenn Greenwald, who had reported for the Guardian on material released by the American whistleblower, Edward Snowden."
"Miranda's phone and laptop were confiscated and he was held incommunicado, without access to friends or lawyer, for the maximum nine hours allowed under law. It is the airport equivalent of smashing into someone's flat, rifling through their drawers and stealing papers and documents. It is simple harassment and intimidation."
2. Classify all government crimes and violations of the Constitution as secret
3. Create a class of 4.5 million privileged individuals, many of them corporate employees, with access to classified documents but allege it is illegal for public to see leaked classified documents
4. Spy on the public in violation of the Constitution
5. Classify environmental activists as terrorists while allowing Big Coal and Big Oil to pollute and destroy the planet
Presto, what looks like a democracy is really an authoritarian state ruling on its own behalf and that of 2000 corporations, databasing the activities of 312 million innocent citizens and actively helping destroy the planet while forestalling climate activism."
"Gaining muscle is an incredibly worthwhile pursuit that takes time and energy. And it can take a LONG TIME if you aren’t going about it in the right way. So, to simplify it, I like to think about it in this framework:
For the purpose of this article, I am going to focus on the EATING SIDE because this is where most guys I have trained are messing up when they come to me. Problem: Most guys simply aren’t eating enough.
Solution: Eat enough.
"Duh. But what is enough? ENOUGH = the amount of food you need to eat to make the number on the scale go up two weeks in a row. A lot of times, ENOUGH is often accompanied by feelings of fullness, nausea, distaste with food in general..."
"Did anyone ever imagine a government so scared of its own shadow? I can think of at least two people who did. One is novelist and essayist Robert Anton Wilson, who often wrote satirically about conspiracies. Any secret police agency, he suggested, must be monitored by another arm of the government, lest it be infiltrated by its enemies. But then “a sinister infinite regress enters the game. Any elite second order police must be, also, subject to infiltration... So it, too, must be monitored, by a secret-police-of-the-third-order” and so on. “In practice, of course, this cannot regress to mathematical infinity, but only to the point where every citizen is spying on every other citizen or until the funding runs out.” The point applies not just to police but to any hierarchy with secrets to hide."
"Hempfest began with an ominious feel. There was a security checkpoint, stocked with the natural enemy of the Pacific Northwest stoner: The Seattle PD. "It looked like the local cops were all fired up to harsh people’s mellow," wrote a Daily Beast reporter, "right as they walked through the gates and got their bags searched." Then cops, strangely, weren't there to confiscate smoking apparatuses or ounces of kush. They instead handed out bags of Doritos. Over 1,000 in all. Paranoid stoners looked for "suspicious powders" and other evidence of trickery. They found this hilarious sticker instead."
"It's an odd confluence of travel, updates, and location-checking, but it points out just how totally, irretrievably broken the idea of DRM and region-controls for ebooks is."
"NBC reports that senior US Attorney James Trump sent Lavabit founder Ladar Levison and his lawyer a veiled arrest threat when Levison shut down his private email service (used by NSA leaker Edward Snowden) rather than comply with a secret order to spy on his customers. Nothing more can be said definitively, because the order to Levison came with a gag order prohibiting Levison from discussing it. Everyone is pretty sure that Levison was served with a National Security Letter."
"The partner of the Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programmes by the US National SecurityAgency was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through London's Heathrow airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro."
"Theory #1: Native Americans are minions of Satan.
Theory #2: A southern cabal killed presidents Harrison, Taylor, and Lincoln, and it tried to kill presidents Jackson and Buchanan.
Theory #3: White doctors are conducting covert experiments on blacks.
Theory #4: Working in secret, a conspiracy replaced the country's original constitution with a document that concentrated more power in the national government.
Theory #5: The U.S. government deliberately undermined protest movements in the 1960s.
Spoiler alert: The first two are fantasies; the next two are sometimes accurate and sometimes fantasies, depending on which version of the story you hear; the last is just plain true."
Korean Taekwondoist Throws One of the Best First Pitches of All Time - BroBible.com: "We’ve already established that baseball in America is a stuffy old boys club while baseball in Korea is a nonstop jamboree of fun and flair. If you need more evidence, here’s an example of some of the unbridled joy finding its way into the usually mundane realm of first pitches."
NSA Spying: The Three Pillars of Government Trust Have Fallen | Electronic Frontier Foundation: "First, the Executive. After a review of internal NSA audits of the spying programs provided by Edward Snowden, the Post lays out—in stark detail—that the claims of oversight inside the Executive Branch are empty. The article reveals that an internal NSA audit not shown to Congress, the President, or the FISA Court detailed thousands of violations where the NSA collected, stored, and accessed American's communications content and other information... Second, the FISA Court. The Post presents a second article in which the Chief Judge of the FISA Court admits that the court is unable to act as a watchdog or stop the NSA's abuses... Third, the Congress. Last week, Representative Sensenbrenner complained that "the practice of classified briefings are a 'rope-a-dope operation' in which lawmakers are given information and then forbidden from speaking out about it." Members of Congress who do not serve on the Intelligence Committees in the both the House and Senate have had difficulty in obtaining documents about the NSA spying. Last week, it was even uncovered that the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers, failed to provide freshmen members of Congress vital documents about the NSA's activities during a key vote to reapprove the spying."
Bill Clinton continues his interesting relationship with words/truth, as a vegan who eats fish and eggs [truthfully, moreso just shoddy reporting... still, funny.] - Bill Clinton Reveals How He Became a Vegan - AARP:
"Once a week or so, he will have a helping of organic salmon or an omelet made with omega-3-fortified eggs"
"The U.S. is not a forgiving country, and most Americans believe in harsh punishment for serious crimes. I’ve no quarrel with that. But the principle of proportionality — really, the very notion of justice in sentencing — seems to have been overthrown. According to a forthcoming report from the American Civil Liberties Union, 2,074 federal inmates are serving sentences of life imprisonment without possibility of parole for nonviolent crimes. Think about that...
The U.S. — a country that loves freedom, so I’m told — has virtually abolished trial by jury. According to one recent count, guilty pleas resolve 97 percent of federal cases that are prosecuted to a conclusion. Instead of bothersome trials, the U.S. has a plea-bargain system in which prosecutors not only bring the charge but also, in effect, determine guilt and pass sentence. As this astonishing assault on civil liberty proceeds, judges have allowed themselves to be turned into rubber-stamping functionaries, apparently for reasons of administrative simplicity...
In this system, everything — everything — depends on the decency and restraint of prosecutors. Most no doubt are indeed decent and restrained. (If that weren’t so, the demand for radical change would already be overwhelming.) But some lust after high political office and wish to make their mark; some are vain; some, as in any profession, are just bad people. The American way is to create checks and balances, so that the system’s integrity doesn’t depend on the incorruptibility of individuals. How strange that the country has made an exception for criminal justice...
You can tell from my puzzlement and outrage that I’m not a lawyer. It takes years of legal training to be acquainted with this system and not be appalled by it. Somebody who knows more about the law than I do will have to explain why plea bargains and mandatory minimum sentences don’t violate the Constitution’s requirements of “due process” and “equal protection of the laws,” or why life in prison without parole for a nonviolent offense isn’t an instance of the “cruel and unusual punishment” forbidden by the Eighth Amendment. You’ll need an expert to tell you why the Supreme Court was right to uphold a sentence of 50 years to life (under California’s three-strikes rule) for the crime of stealing nine video cassettes..."
"One day, he was pulled over for a traffic violation by a local cop who proceeded to display an array of puffing, threatening and abusive behavior of the sort we cover here. After an extended dose of this crap, my buddy turned to the cop, probably with a vein throbbing in his temple, if I know him, and said something to the effect of, "I work at X hospital in the emergency room. God help you if you ever end up there." The encounter abruptly ended on a note of detente. In this world, there are people it's dangerous to piss off, and that's as true for judges and police officers as it is for anybody else."
"I like to stay above the fray, but I really do want to refute all the common tired cliches that get busted out when people try to shame men from dating the young and hot...
“You just like younger girls because they’re the only ones who fall for your tricks! You like them because they are easier to manipulate!”
Let’s cut right to the core: Feminists say things like this because they hate young, beautiful girls and believe they are all stupid...
Girls are not stupid, innocent victims. They are predator, not prey. Girls of every age are the manipulators far more often than they are the manipulated. After age 24, women definitely do not get smarter about relationships... Besides, this premise is backwards. It is far easier to game older women into bed. They have less options...
“You date younger girls because you can’t get a girl your own age!”
Young girls being so in demand in the sexual market, any guy that can date one could easily pull an older one, he just doesn’t want to.
“No, really, an older woman would never put up with your shit!”
I won’t put up with her loose skin, baggage and jaded bitterness. Everybody wins!
“You’re intimidated by a strong, independent woman!”
Replace “intimidated by” with “not attracted to”, and you have the truth. When it comes to attracting a man, strength, independence and wisdom mean nothing. Youth, beauty and sweetness mean everything. Don’t Lean In.
“Younger girls are inexperienced, you should date someone older who knows what she wants!”
You see how most of the shaming tactics feminists use involve demeaning younger girls? Young girls know what they want just fine. Older women know what they want to: They want to be young again.
“Young girls are so immature!”
Age does not equal maturity...
“You date younger girls for your ego! You just want to brag about it because you’re insecure!”
Men date younger girls because they are hot... but any sense of well-being a guy gets from dating a young, beautiful, fertile girl is evolutionarily justified. Darwin says suck it...
“So you expect women to just go away and die when they get older? They have no value on earth?”
I am talking about sexual market value and attractiveness only. That you think sex is the only measure of female value says more about you than it does about me..."