Million Dollar Baby Quotes

So why am I depressed? That's the million-dollar question, baby, the Tootsie Roll question; not even the owl knows the answer to that one. I don't know either. All I know is the chronology.

Women deserve better than organizations bearing the names of racist rapists funding million dollar campaigns on subway trains. These wealthy middle aged white men tell us what to do with our bodies while they wage wars and kill other people's babies.

Do you think we enjoy hearing about your brand-new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our own grimy little shoe boxes and we're pushing thirty? A home you won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of your having been born at the right time in history? You'd last about ten minutes if you were my age these days.

That’s all kids want to know—that you love them.

I just hope he went someplace where he could find a little peace... somewhere between nowhere and goodbye...

The winners are simply willing to do what losers won't.

Appreciate every single person. Look at them like a golden, million-dollar baby.

Do you know how much a freaking baby costs? A million dollars.

It's the magic of risking everything for a dream that nobody sees but you.

How we eat is connected to how we care for the planet which is connected to how we use our resources which is connected to how many people in the world go to bed hungry every night which is connected to how food is distributed which is connected to the massive inequalities in our world between those who have and those who don't which is connected to how our justice system treats people who use their power and position to make hundreds of millions of dollars while others struggle just to buy groceries which is connected to how we treat those who don't have what we have which is connected to the sanctity and holiness and mystery of our human life and their human life and his little human life which is why we hold up that baby's hand and say to the parents, 'it's just so small.

James was stiff, and his arm was asleep, and he wasn't sure he'd ever get the kink out of his neck, but he had a baby boy sleeping like a rock on his chest and a gorgeous woman sleeping like a rock up against his side, her cheek on his chest, some of her hair clutched in the baby's fist, and a shaggy dog sleeping like a rock on his left foot. James wouldn't have moved for a million dollars.

La magia de librar batallas más allá de lo humanamente soportable se basa en lo mágico que resulta arriesgarlo todo por un sueño que nadie más alcanza a ver excepto tú.

Without warning he had become witness to something that stretched back through the eons, ties both elastic and enduring, surpassing death, surpassing life. She was his child. It was as simple as that and that complex.

I can guarantee it, " Jenks said as their eyes met. The second that you see her, you will fall in love. You will do anything for her, anything at all, and she will know it and love you back. That’s all kids want to know—that you love them.

From 1976 to 1983, Washington supported a devastating military dictatorship in Argentina that ran all branches of government, outlawed elections, and encouraged school and business leaders to provide information on subversive people. The administration took control of the police, banned political and union organizations, and tried to eliminate all oppositional elements in the country through harassment, torture, and murder. Journalists, students, and union members faced a particularly large amount of bloody repression, thus ridding the nation of a whole generation of social movement leaders. As was the case in other Latin American countries, the threat of communism and armed guerrilla movements was used as an excuse for Argentina's dictatorial crackdowns. Hundreds of torture camps and prisons were created. Many of the dead were put into mass graves or thrown out of places into the ocean. Five hundred babies of the murdered were given to torturers' families and the assets of the dead totaling in the tens of millions of dollars, were all divided up among the perpetrators of the nightmare. Thirty thousand people were killed in Argentina's repression.

Their management and regulation of our lives spans the total spectrum of American experience, from their obtuse Imperial Measurement System, to their irregularity-strangled English language. From their lobbyist-ruled government bureaucracy, to their consumer-oriented religious holidays like Christmas. From their brainless professional sports jocks cast as heroes, to their anorexic supermodels warping the concept of beauty. These are the people who made sugary colas more important that water; fast food more important than health; television sitcoms more important than reading literature. They made smoking a joint in your home a crime; going out in public without your hair tinted an embarrassment; and accidentally carrying a half-filled bottle of baby formula on an airplane a terrorist act. Do you realize 85 percent of Americans still say 'God bless you' after someone sneezes? And that 'In God We Trust' is on every single dollar in circulation? Or that 'One nation under God' is recited everyday in the Pledge of Allegiance by millions of impressionable kids?

Immigrants who had never failed to repay a debt, because they had never been given a loan, often had surprisingly high thin-file FICO scores. Thus a Jamaican baby nurse or Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 looking to borrow three-quarters of a million dollars, when filtered through the models at Moody’s and S&P, became suddenly more useful, from a credit-rigging point of view. They might actually improve the perceived quality of the pool of loans and increase the percentage that could be declared triple-A. The Mexican harvested strawberries; Wall Street harvested his FICO score.

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things. They mostly don’t care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It’s about money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don’t have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who the real Americans are. Call it the “Rove 1-2.” That’s literally all it’s taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. Policywise, a typical Republican voter never even asks a politician to go to second base. While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn’t get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted.

All the recent marketing successes have been PR successes, not advertising successes. To name a few: Starbucks, The Body Shop, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, eBay, Palm, Google, Linus, PlayStation, Harry Potter, Botox, Red Bull, Microsoft, Intel, and BlackBerry. A closer look at the history of most major brands shows this to be true. As a matter of fact, an astonishing number of well-known brands have been built with virtually no advertising at all. Anita Roddick built The Body Shop into a worldwide brand without any advertising. Instead she traveled the world looking for ingredients for her natural cosmetics, a quest that resulted in endless publicity. Until recently Starbucks didn’t spend a hill of beans on advertising either. In its first ten years, the company spent less that $10 million (total) on advertising in the United States, a trivial amount for a brand that delivers annual sales of $1.3 billion today. Wal-Mart became the world’s largest retailer, ringing up sales approaching $200 billion, with little advertising. Sam’s Club, a Wal-Mart sibling, averages $56 million per store with almost no advertising. In the pharmaceutical field, Viagra, Prozac, and Vioxx became worldwide brands with almost no advertising. In the toy field, Beanie Babies, Tickle Me Elmo, and Pokémon became highly successful brands with almost no advertising. In the high-technology field, Oracle, Cisco, and SAP became multibillion-dollar companies (and multibillion-dollar brands) with almost no advertising.

The average household income in America is right around $50,000 per year, according to the Census Bureau. Joe and Suzy Average would invest $7,500 (15 percent) per year or $625 per month. If you make $50,000 per year and have no payments except the house mortgage and live on a budget, can you invest $625 per month? Follow me here. If Joe and Suzy invest $625 per month with no match into Roth IRAs from age thirty to age seventy, they will have $7,588,545 tax-FREE! That is almost $8 million. What if I’m half-wrong? What if you end up with only $4 million? What if I’m six times wrong? Sure beats the 97 out of 100 sixty-five-year-olds who can’t write a check for $600! I would submit to you that Joe and Suzy are well below average. Why? In our example they started at the average household income in America, and in forty years of work never got a raise. They saved 15 percent of income and never increased it by one dollar. There is no excuse to retire without financial dignity in the United States today. Most of you will have well over $2 million pass through your hands in your working lifetime, so do something about catching some of that money. Gayle asked me one day if it was too late for her to start saving. Gayle wasn’t twenty-seven like Joe and Suzy. She was fifty-seven years old, but with her attitude you would have thought this lady was 107. Harold Fisher had a much better outlook at age one hundred than Gayle did at age fifty-seven. Life had dealt her some blows and had knocked most of the hope out of her. A Total Money Makeover is not a magic show. You start where you are, and you do the steps. These steps work if you are twenty-seven or fifty-seven, and they don’t change. Gayle might be starting the retirement investing step at sixty that Joe and Suzy start at thirty years old. Gayle was unwise to enter her sixties without an emergency fund and with credit-card debt and a car payment. She, like all of us, couldn’t save when she has debt and no umbrella for when it rains. Would it have been better for Gayle to start when she was twenty-seven or even forty-seven? Obviously. But once she was done with the pity party, she still needed to start with Baby Step One and follow The Total Money Makeover step-by-step to put herself in the best position possible.

The real secret to eliminating poverty is not a secret at all. It’s amazingly simple, but it makes the people living in their tony little bubbles seethe with rage. Ready for this? Marriage. Sounds too simple to be true, but here’s a fact—the Beverly LaHaye Institute researched data in 2012 to discover that if a family has two married parents, the poverty rate is about 7.5 percent. If a family is headed by a single mother, the poverty rate is almost 34 percent. While Hollywood celebrities make it seem quite normal to have a baby now, and think about a husband later (if at all or ever), most young, single women having babies aren’t Hollywood starlets with millions of dollars to afford full-time live-in nannies, private jets, and private schools. And the War on Poverty we discussed earlier was launched fifty years ago when most children were raised by two married parents. The Heritage Foundation has done extensive and admirable research on the economics of the family and found that the poverty rate for white, married couples in 2009 was 3.2 percent. If it was a white nonmarried family, the poverty rate jumped to 22 percent. For black couples who were married, 7 percent were in poverty; if a nonmarried black family, that number soared to almost 36 percent!

Life as an Enron employee was good. Prestwood’s annual salary rose steadily to sixty-five thousand dollars, with additional retirement benefits paid in Enron stock. When Houston Natural and Internorth had merged, all of Prestwood’s investments were automatically converted to Enron stock. He continued to set aside money in the company’s retirement fund, buying even more stock. Internally, the company relentlessly promoted employee stock ownership. Newsletters touted Enron’s growth as “simply stunning,” and Lay, at company events, urged employees to buy more stock. To Prestwood, it didn’t seem like a problem that his future was tied directly to Enron’s. Enron had committed to him, and he was showing his gratitude. “To me, this is the American way, loyalty to your employer,” he says. Prestwood was loyal to the bitter end. When he retired in 2000, he had accumulated 13,500 shares of Enron stock, worth $1.3 million at their peak. Then, at age sixty-eight, Prestwood suddenly lost his entire Enron nest egg. He now survives on a previous employer’s pension of $521 a month and a Social Security check of $1,294. “There aint no such thing as a dream anymore,” he says. He lives on a three-acre farm north of Houston willed to him as a baby in 1938 after his mother died. “I hadn’t planned much for the retirement. Wanted to go fishing, hunting. I was gonna travel a little.

New York is a city of eight million people, approximately seven million of whom will be furious when they hear you were in town and didn’t meet them for an expensive dinner, five million furious you didn’t visit their new baby, three million furious you didn’t see their new show, one million furious you didn’t call for sex, but only five actually available to meet you. It is completely reasonable to call none of them. You could instead sneak off to a terrible, treacly Broadway show that you will never admit you paid two hundred dollars to see. This is what Less does on his first night, eating a hot dog dinner to make up for the extravagance. You cannot call it a guilty pleasure when the lights go down and the curtain goes up, when the adolescent heart begins to beat along with the orchestra, not when you feel no guilt. And he feels none; he feels only the shiver of delight when there is nobody around to judge you. It is a bad musical, but, like a bad lay, a bad musical can still do its job perfectly well. By the end, Arthur Less is in tears, sobbing in his seat, and he thinks he has been sobbing quietly until the lights come up and the woman seated beside him turns and says, “Honey, I don’t know what happened in your life, but I am so so sorry,” and gives him a lilac-scented embrace. Nothing happened to me, he wants to say to her. Nothing happened to me. I’m just a homosexual at a Broadway show

These senators and representatives call themselves “leaders.” One of the primary principles of leadership is that a leader never asks or orders any follower to do what he or she would not do themselves. Such action requires the demonstration of the acknowledged traits of a leader among which are integrity, honesty, and courage, both physical and moral courage. They don’t have those traits nor are they willing to do what they ask and order. Just this proves we elect people who shouldn’t be leading the nation. When the great calamity and pain comes, it will have been earned and deserved. The piper always has to be paid at the end of the party. The party is about over. The bill is not far from coming due. Everybody always wants the guilty identified. The culprits are we the people, primarily the baby boom generation, which allowed their vote to be bought with entitlements at the expense of their children, who are now stuck with the national debt bill that grows by the second and cannot be paid off. These follow-on citizens—I call them the screwed generation—are doomed to lifelong grief and crushing debt unless they take the only other course available to them, which is to repudiate that debt by simply printing up $20 trillion, calling in all federal bills, bonds, and notes for payoff, and then changing from the green dollar to say a red dollar, making the exchange rate 100 or 1000 green dollars for 1 red dollar or even more to get to zero debt. Certainly this will create a great international crisis. But that crisis is coming anyhow. In fact it is here already. The U.S. has no choice but to eventually default on that debt. This at least will be a controlled default rather than an uncontrolled collapse. At present it is out of control. Congress hasn’t come up with a budget in 3 years. That’s because there is no way at this point to create a viable budget that will balance and not just be a written document verifying that we cannot legitimately pay our bills and that we are on an ever-descending course into greater and greater debt. A true, honest budget would but verify that we are a bankrupt nation. We are repeating history, the history we failed to learn from. The history of Rome. Our TV and video games are the equivalent distractions of the Coliseums and circus of Rome. Our printing and borrowing of money to cover our deficit spending is the same as the mixing and devaluation of the gold Roman sisteri with copper. Our dysfunctional and ineffectual Congress is as was the Roman Senate. Our Presidential executive orders the same as the dictatorial edicts of Caesar. Our open borders and multi-millions of illegal alien non-citizens the same as the influx of the Germanic and Gallic tribes. It is as if we were intentionally following the course written in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The military actions, now 11 years in length, of Iraq and Afghanistan are repeats of the Vietnam fiasco and the RussianAfghan incursion. Our creep toward socialism is no different and will bring the same implosion as socialism did in the U.S.S.R. One should recognize that the repeated application of failed solutions to the same problem is one of the clinical definitions of insanity. * * * I am old, ill, physically used up now. I can’t have much time left in this life. I accept that. All born eventually die and with the life I’ve lived, I probably should have been dead decades ago. Fate has allowed me to screw the world out of a lot of years. I do have one regret: the future holds great challenge. I would like to see that challenge met and overcome and this nation restored to what our founding fathers envisioned. I’d like to be a part of that. Yeah. “I’d like to do it again.” THE END PHOTOS Daniel Hill 1954 – 15

With the news that he would soon be a daddy again, Steve seemed inspired to work even harder. Our zoo continued to get busier, and we had trouble coping with the large numbers. The biggest draw was the crocodiles. Crowds poured in for the croc shows, filling up all the grandstands. The place was packed. Steve came up with a monumental plan. He was a big fan of the Colosseum-type arenas of the Roman gladiator days. He sketched out his idea for me on a piece of paper. “Have a go at this, it’s a coliseum,” he declared, his eyes wide with excitement. He drew an oval, then a series of smaller ovals in back of it. “Then we have crocodile ponds where the crocs could live. Every day a different croc could come out for the show and swim through a canal system”--he sketched rapidly--“then come out in the main area.” “Canals,” I said. “Could you get them to come in on cue?” “Piece of cake!” he said. “And get this! We call it…the Crocoseum!” His enthusiasm was contagious. Never mind that nothing like this had ever been done before. Steve was determined to take the excitement and hype of the ancient Roman gladiators and combine it with the need to show people just how awesome crocs really were. But it was a huge project. There was nothing to compare it to, because nothing even remotely similar had ever been attempted anywhere in the world. I priced it out: The budget to build the arena would have to be somewhere north of eight million dollars, a huge expense. Wes, John, Frank, and I all knew we’d have to rely on Steve’s knowledge of crocodiles to make this work. Steve’s enthusiasm never waned. He was determined. This would become the biggest structure at the zoo. The arena would seat five thousand and have space beneath it for museums, shops, and a food court. The center of the arena would have land areas large enough for people to work around crocodiles safely and water areas large enough for crocs to be able to access them easily. “How is this going to work, Steve?” I asked, after soberly assessing the cost. What if we laid out more than eight million dollars and the crocodiles decided not to cooperate? “How are you going to convince a crocodile to come out exactly at showtime, try to kill and eat the keeper, and then go back home again?” I bit my tongue when I realized what was coming out of my mouth: advice on crocodiles directed at the world’s expert on croc behavior. Steve was right with his philosophy: Build it, and they will come. These were heady times. As the Crocoseum rose into the sky, my tummy got bigger and bigger with our new baby. It felt like I was expanding as rapidly as the new project. The Crocoseum debuted during an Animal Planet live feed, its premiere beamed all over the world. The design was a smashing success. Once again, Steve had confounded the doubters.

People Magazine recently paid a movie star $4.1 million dollars. To make a movie? No, $4.1 million dollars was paid for the right to publish pictures of the actor’s new baby. America’s media covered the unfortunate death of singer Michael Jackson non-stop for days on end. We are “mad upon our idols.

The AAP, an organisation supposedly concerned with child health, considered quality control an extravagance, whilst millions of dollars were, and are, spent by the baby food industry on advertising and promotions such as free lunches, conferences and services to doctors.

Where to find the borrowers with high FICO scores? Here the Wall Street bond trading desks exploited another blind spot in the rating agencies’ models. Apparently the agencies didn’t grasp the difference between a “thin-file” FICO score and a “thick-file” FICO score. A thin-file FICO score implied, as it sounds, a short credit history. The file was thin because the borrower hadn’t done much borrowing. Immigrants who had never failed to repay a debt, because they had never been given a loan, often had surprisingly high thin-file FICO scores. Thus a Jamaican baby nurse or Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 looking to borrow three-quarters of a million dollars, when filtered through the models at Moody’s and S&P, became suddenly more useful, from a credit-rigging point of view. They might actually improve the perceived quality of the pool of loans and increase the percentage that could be declared triple-A. The Mexican harvested strawberries; Wall Street harvested his FICO score.

America today is not the same nation as when you were born. Depending on your age, if you were born in America, your home nation was a significantly different land than it is today:   ·                    America didn’t allow aborting babies in the womb; ·                     Same sex marriage was not only illegal, no one ever talked about it, or even seriously considered the possibility; (“The speed and breadth of change (in the gay movement) has just been breathtaking.”, New York Times, June 21, 2009) ·                    Mass media was clean and non-offensive. Think of The I Love Lucy Show or The Walton Family, compared with what is aired today; ·                    The United States government did not take $500 million dollars every year from the taxpayers and give it to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider. ·                    Videogames that glorify violence, cop killing and allow gamesters who have bought millions of copies, to have virtual sex with women before killing them, did not exist. ·                    Americans’ tax dollars did not fund Title X grants to Planned Parenthood who fund a website which features videos that show a “creepy guidance counselor who gives advice to teens on how to have (safe) sex and depict teens engaged in sex.” ·                    Americans didn’t owe $483,000 per household for unfunded retirement and health care obligations (Peter G. Peterson Foundation). ·                    The phrase “sound as a dollar” meant something. ·                    The Federal government’s debt was manageable.            American Christian missionaries who have been abroad for relatively short times say they find it hard to believe how far this nation has declined morally since they were last in the country. In just a two week period, not long ago, these events all occurred: the Iowa Supreme Court declared that same sex marriage was legal in the State; the President on a foreign tour declared that “we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation…” and a day later bowed before the King of the nation that supplied most of the 9/11 terrorists; Vermont became the first State to authorize same sex marriage by legislative action, as opposed to judicial dictate; the CEO of General Motors was fired by the federal government; an American ship was boarded and its crew captured by pirates for the first time in over 200 years; and a major Christian leader/author apologized on Larry King Live for supporting California’s Proposition 8 in defense of traditional marriage, reversing his earlier position. The pace of societal change is rapidly accelerating.

when are you going to marry me?” “When you have a million dollars, baby,” I say, tossing my hip-length braid over my shoulder. I point at the metal pitcher of cream on the table. “Need more?

Imagine that you have a big juicy golden yellow mango. You’re just about to bite into it when a thought of its origin crosses your mind. Some wonderful farmer, many years ago planted a seed. Like rearing a tiny baby, the farmer tended to his mango saplings with love and care. He used the right kind of soil, a large quantity of water, the best of fertilizers and perfect sunlight. His joy knew no bounds as he watched the seed transform first into a tender green sapling and then into a tree. He protected it like his own baby. A few years later, the tree started flowering and bore small raw mangoes. With the passage of time, the mangoes turned ripe and golden. Then, with gentle wrinkled hands the farmer plucked the mangoes, laid them softly over the basket and carried them to town. From the village to the town, from the farmer to the shopkeeper, traversing through unknown destinations over thousands of miles the mango finally reached your super-store. The love and the labour of so many individuals along with total support from the eco-system have all come together to give birth to this lovely mango. You spotted it the next day, paid for it and now it rests in your hands. As you sink your teeth and bite the mango, you realize that you are lucky to taste the loveliest and juiciest of mangoes. Just like the mango, everything in life is a culmination of the efforts, love and contribution of many people. Can you ever put a price on the many elements which have gone into the divine creation of the mango? You have taken it so much for granted that you don’t realize how expensive it will be to produce even a single mango. And you got it so cheap. How much will you cherish when you bite a mango and know that its worth is hundreds of thousand rupees. And this is the same with everything that we buy or use. Next time when you get dressed, wear your watch, grab your mobile phone or travel by car, realize that their essential value is worth a million dollars. Not only will you be able to enjoy all those to the fullest, but also you will stop complaining about the high cost.

TRAGIC RACISM HERETOFORE IGNORED Rich and poor have this in common: The Lord is the Maker of them all. Proverbs 22:2 Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger was a racial eugenicist, a proponent of the idea that through birth control, abortion, and sterilization of the “unfit” we could create a “cleaner” human race and enable “the cultivation of the better racial elements.” She actually addressed this with the Ku Klux Klan. Yet far from repudiating Sanger, liberal leaders defend her. Hillary Clinton expresses great admiration for her; Barack Obama praises Planned Parenthood and asks God to bless what they do; the New York Times has mentioned Sanger as a replacement for Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill. When the media went into hysterics trying to ban the Confederate Battle Flag—while simultaneously ignoring the revelations about Planned Parenthood harvesting the organs of aborted babies, and babies born alive, for profit—I posted a graphic of the rebel flag alongside the Planned Parenthood logo with this question: “Which symbol killed 90,000 black babies last year?” Our government—using your tax dollars—is not to be subsidizing abortion. It’s illegal and immoral. Yet, Planned Parenthood receives more than a million tax dollars out of your pocket every single day. It shouldn’t get a penny. Good news: light now shines on this darkness. The abortionists were caught on tape nibbling lunch and sipping wine while nonchalantly pondering where to spend the profits made from bartering the bodies of innocent babies . . . just another day at the office. I know that it sounds unbelievable, like something from a macabre horror movie script—but the exposé must stir you to action, lest a nation, through complacency, accept the most revolting mission of Margaret Sanger. SWEET FREEDOM IN Action Today, don’t just pray for unborn children. Demand that Congress stop funding abortion mills; elect a pro-life president; support pro-life centers that provide resources to give parents a real choice in this debate—knowing that choosing life is ultimately the beautiful choice.

... a man cannot win if he's at the same time a horse and a jockey.

Always think about the people whom you encountered while climbing, because you will meet them even when you get down.

The match losses the one who cannot control himself.

We would be a lot safer if the Government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. I used to think that science would save us, and science certainly tried. But we can't stand any more tremendous explosions, either for or against democracy. Only in superstition is there hope. If you want to become a friend of civilization, then become an enemy of truth and a fanatic for harmless balderdash. I know that millions of dollars have been spent to produce this splendid graduating class, and that the main hope of your teachers was, once they got through with you, that you would no longer be superstitious. I' sorry—I have to undo that now. I beg you to believe in the most ridiculous superstition of all: that humanity is at the center of the universe, the fulfiller or the frustrator of the grandest dreams of God Almighty. If you can believe that, and make others believe it, then there might be hope for us. Human beings might stop treating each other like garbage, might begin to treasure and protect each other instead. Then it might be alright to have babies again.

Hey, we’ll let Huckleberry enjoy his lunch. Speaking of something, if you are in a better mood now, come with me to the Rainforest Room. I have something to show you. I wanted to wait until you calmed down because it means a lot to me, and I hoped you might be happy for me. Here, come with me.” He led her back to the previous room, which had amazing, rare rainforest plants in it. “Check this out!” He tossed her a magazine that said Horticultural Digest on the cover. Holly neatly caught it and opened it up to the dog-eared page. Blaring across the page in huge font was the title: WILLIAM SMITH, THE RAINMAKER OF SHELLESBY COLLEGE’S FAMOUS RAINFOREST ROOM. It was a five-page spread with big glossy photos of the Rainforest Room sprinkled throughout the article. “Five, count ‘em, five pages! That’s my record. Until now, they’ve only given me four. Check it out: I’m the Rainmaker, baby! Let it rain, let it rainnnn!” William stomped around in make-believe puddles on the floor. He picked up a garden hose lying along the side of the room and held it upright like an umbrella. “I’m singing in the rain, just singing in the rain. What a glorious feeling. I’m happy again.” Holly squealed with laughter and applauded. William jumped up on a large over-turned pot and shifted the hose to now play air guitar while he repeated the verse. “William, there is no air guitar in that song!” “There is now, baby!” Holly exploded again in laughter, clutching her sides. After a few more seconds of air guitar, William jumped off the pot and lowered his voice considerably. “Thank you, thank you very much,” William said in his Elvis impersonation. He now held the garden hose like a microphone and said, “My next song is dedicated to my beagle, my very own hound dog, my Sweetpea. Sweetpea, girl, this is for youuuuuuu.” He now launched into Elvis’s famous “Hound Dog.” “You ain’t nothing but a hound dogggg.” With this, he also twirled the hose by holding it tight two feet from the nozzle, then twirling the nozzle in little circles above his head like a lasso. “Work it, William! Work it!” Holly screamed in laughter. He did some choice hip swivels as he sang “Hound Dog,” sending Holly into peals of laughter. “William, stop! Stop! Where are you? I can’t see I’m crying so hard!” William dropped his voice even lower and more dramatically. In his best Elvis voice, he said, “Well, if you can’t find me darlin’, I’ll find you.” He dropped on one knee and gently picked up her hand. “Thank you, thank you very much,” he said in Elvis mode. “My next song, I dedicate to my one and only, to my Holly-Dolly. Little prickly pear, this one’s for youuuuuu.” He now launched into Elvis’s famous “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You.” “Take my hand, take my whole life, too, for I can’t help falling in love with you.” With that, he gave her hand a soft kiss. He then jumped up onto an empty potting table and spun around once on his butt, then pushed himself the length of the entire table, and slid off the far end. “Loose, footloose!” William picked up his garden-hose microphone again and kept singing. “Kick off the Sunday shoes . . .” He sang the entire song, and then Holly exploded in appreciative applause. He was breathing heavily and had a million-dollar smile on his face. “Hoo-wee, that was fun! I am so sweaty now, hoo-boy!” He splashed some water on his face, and then shook his hair. “William! When are you going to enter that karaoke contest at the coffee shop in town? They’re paying $1,000 to the winner of their contest. No one can beat you! That was unbelievable!” “That was fun.” William laughed. “Are in a better mood now?” “How can I not be? You are THE best!

In 1900, George and Clara Morris and their four children, Samuel, Selma, Marcella, and Malvina, left Bucharest, Romania, and boarded a ship for New York City. When they arrived in the United States, they stayed in New York City for a few weeks and then decided to move to Los Angeles, where George wanted to become a director in the movie business. Along the way, in St. Louis, Clara had another baby and died in childbirth. George put the children in an orphanage there before heading on to Los Angeles, where he promised to send for them. The children stayed in the orphanage until the oldest child, Marcella, was able to make enough money to get them all out. She moved them back to New York City, where she became the first Jewish female to hold a seat on the Wall Street stock exchange, where she made millions of dollars that she later gave to Brandeis University. She lived with her sisters in an apartment on Charles Street in Greenwich Village and had a house in Southampton, New York, and somewhere along the way had an affair with J. P. Morgan. Interesting? You bet. But don’t worry about remembering any of this, because it’s 90 percent wrong, which I didn’t find out until years later.

If the Premier No.1 garage was the

Life as an Enron employee was good. Prestwood’s annual salary rose steadily to sixty-five thousand dollars, with additional retirement benefits paid in Enron stock. When Houston Natural and Internorth had merged, all of Prestwood’s investments were automatically converted to Enron stock. He continued to set aside money in the company’s retirement fund, buying even more stock. Internally, the company relentlessly promoted employee stock ownership. Newsletters touted Enron’s growth as “simply stunning,” and Lay, at company events, urged employees to buy more stock. To Prestwood, it didn’t seem like a problem that his future was tied directly to Enron’s. Enron had committed to him, and he was showing his gratitude. “To me, this is the American way, loyalty to your employer,” he says. Prestwood was loyal to the bitter end. When he retired in 2000, he had accumulated 13,500 shares of Enron stock, worth $1.3 million at their peak. Then, at age sixty-eight, Prestwood suddenly lost his entire Enron nest egg. He now survives on a previous employer’s pension of $521 a month and a Social Security check of $1,294. “There aint no such thing as a dream anymore,” he says. He lives on a three-acre farm north of Houston willed to him as a baby in 1938 after his mother died. “I hadn’t planned much for the retirement. Wanted to go fishing, hunting. I was gonna travel a little.” Now he’ll sell his family’s land. Has to, he says. He is still paying off his mortgage.7 In some respects, Prestwood’s case is not unusual. Often people do not diversify at all, and sometimes employees invest a lot of their money in their employer’s stock. Amazing but true: five million Americans have more than 60 percent of their retirement savings in company stock.8 This concentration is risky on two counts. First, a single security is much riskier than the portfolios offered by mutual funds. Second, as employees of Enron and WorldCom discovered the hard way, workers risk losing both their jobs and the bulk of their retirement savings all at once.

Jesus Christ, Polly Pocket! I’m supposed to look like I’ve been rushing, not like the winner of a wet T-shirt contest!” “Oh, right. My bad,” Polly said with a sheepish grin. “Okay. Now …” Lexi mussed her hair, threw her shoulders back, and then lifted her chin. “Drizzle me, baby. Make me sweat.

Our media also lavish mega attention on our idols, devoting countless hours of coverage to actors and sports figures, much of the coverage about how they get into trouble. Some networks admit to trying to include some daily snippet of “news” about Britney Spears, or Lindsay Lohan, or some other troubled famous young actor, co-enabled by the coverage and public attention, into their behavior. Some of the nation’s bestselling magazines and weekly newspapers exclusively report on the varied activities of public figures, almost all in the entertainment industry. People Magazine recently paid a movie star $4.1 million dollars. To make a movie? No, $4.1 million dollars was paid for the right to publish pictures of her new baby. America’s media covered the unfortunate death of singer Michael Jackson non-stop for days on end. We are “mad upon our idols.

Their management and regulation of our lives spans the total spectrum of American experience, from their obtuse Imperial Measurement System, to their irregularity-strangled English language. From their lobbyist-ruled government bureaucracy, to their consumer-oriented religious holidays like Christmas. From their brainless professional sports jocks cast as heroes, to their anorexic supermodels warping the concept of beauty. These are the people who made sugary colas more important than water; fast food more important than health; television sitcoms more important than reading literature. They made smoking a joint in your home a crime; going out in public without your hair tinted an embarrassment; and accidentally carrying a half-filled bottle of baby formula on an airplane a terrorist act. Do you realize 85 percent of Americans still say ‘God bless you’ after someone sneezes? And that ‘In God We Trust’ is on every U.S. dollar in circulation? Or that ‘One nation under God’ is recited every day in the Pledge of Allegiance by millions of impressionable kids?

The baby is fine. Ransom is five million dollars. Do NOT tell the police. Bring the money on Thursday at 2 pm. Any sign of police you will never see her again.