Rarities
A Polish woman just shy of her 30th birthday has given birth by Caesarian section to sextuplets, four girls, two boys, in the 29th week of her pregnancy. Everyone appears fine. It happens once every 4.7 billion deliveries. Welcome to the great adventure, little ones. Cue the Bobby Vinton CD: “ Oh, oh, moja droga ja cie kocham/Means that I love you so…”
In contrast, the USA’s birthrate has fallen to a 32-year-old low. If the trend continues, there won’t be enough tax-payers to cover the future cost of government. There aren’t even enough these days, despite record revenue, as the staggering deficit and debt prove. I’m sure the left will call for mass confiscation. And what will they do when that money runs out?
Billionaire Robert Smith has drawn universal praise for paying off the student loans of the 306 students in the graduating class of Morehouse College, at which he gave the commencement address. My only quibble is the question of whether the young people have been denied the life lesson of paying one’s debts. Then again, they will face many others as they enter the real world. Also, what about the rest of the grads around the country? Perhaps Smith’s example will start a trend. An article in today’s NY Post reveals a lot about him. I wonder if leftists who have sung his praises would rescind them upon learning a few facts. Here’s the gist, edited by yours truly: Smith is the richest black man in America, accumulating his wealth as a hard-nosed buyout king. He is known for firing high-paid management at the companies he acquires, partly by subjecting all employees to a cognitive test first developed by IBM, which identifies workers who are high-performing and relatively inexpensive. Another of his cost-cutting tactics is buying a firm based in a pricey area such as New York or San Francisco and moving it to a lower-cost city. Many employees won’t make the move, allowing Smith to hire cheaper replacements. Sounds like shrewdness to me, and I’d bet the pluses outweigh the minuses by a wide margin. Perhaps his most significant accomplishment, at least to chauvinists, is that in 2015 he married Hope Dworaczyk, Playboy’s 2010 Playmate of the Year. I’m sure that would rile busybodies. And here she is:
On my 69th birthday, people were very kind to the floating book shop. My thanks to my constant benefactress and to Lynn, who donated about 40 books between them; and to Wolf, who bought four CD’s and The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967–1977 by Gershom Gorenberg; and to The Quiet Man, who purchased eight Bruce Springsteen CD’s and three DVD’s; and to the gentleman who selected volumes one and two of The Prophets by Abraham J. Heschel; and to the woman who went home with six novels in Russian.
My Amazon Author page: https://www.amazon.com/Vic-Fortezza/e/B002M4NLJE
FB: https://www.facebook.com/Vic-Fortezza-Author-118397641564801/?fref=ts
Read Vic’s Stories, free: http://fictionaut.com/users/vic-fortezza
