>>My mental patient father abandoned me, my mother and unborn little brother before I was 2.
>>My step-father was an alcoholic gambler.
>>
>>Oh. I guess you won that lottery too. Amazing how many winners we have among us, isn't it. I guess most of us did not grow up with Ward and June Cleaver as parents. Somehow we managed to muddle our way through anyway, didn't we?
>
>>Did you blame other people because your opportunities were not as good as theirs?
>
>NO - my mother would hear none of that crap.
>She said:
>* "The world does not owe you anything." - she meant it too!
>
>>
>>Oh, wait a minute. I think I remember hearing somewhere that the plural of anecdote is not data....
>
>I can give you a whole country full of data - millions of anecdotes.
>There is a quantity thing where anecdotes DO become data, right?
>
>I can summarize with what one Romanian small business guy told me in 2007.
>I was attending a friend's wedding in a small Romanian town.
>The reception hall was communist era - crappy ventilation, it was stifling
>
>I went on the balcony to breathe.
>One look across the town and the material progress was self-evident.
>Everybody had cars, some Mercedes, some Volkswagens and Fiats, and some crappy Dacia cars (communist-made)
>Not everybody had a Mercedes, but everybody did have a car.
>
>So, this guy figures out I am American and strikes up a conversation.
>
>One thing he said really stuck with me:
>He said
> "15 years ago, we were all equal. Everybody had nothing. Just look at us now!"

Michael
What is the probability that someone born to two people whose height is under 5'2 will be a center in the NBA?
Of course our birth points us in a direction.
And of course it can be altered as witnessed by the fact that someone named Barack Hussein Obama was elected president of the US.