Nothing on the left is knocked over in 30 seconds, let along socialism, but at least it’s a start. And below, dealing with The Green New Deal.

It’s a funny business, but the people who know me best sent this kind of message along, and the stranger part is that I completely agree with them. Both have been sent from my oldest Canadian friends: This is from Roy and Ginette, addressed to Susie:

We are sending you and Steve our congratulations on the occasion of your 40^th anniversary.  40 years of wedded bliss is a two way street filled with love and compromises.  Since Roy has known Steven for considerably longer than 40 years he quite sure that you deserve a medal for forgiving and perhaps even embracing Steve’s  many idiosyncrasies, which come as part of a package with his intense intellect and deep loyalty to his friends and family.

With that in mind we are presenting you with an honorary Victoria Cross, Canada’s highest honour. It is given for extraordinary valour and devotion to duty, criteria we are confident that you manifested time and again over the past 40 years.  You can display this VC whenever you think Steve needs to be reminded just how wonderful you are, and have been for him.

And this was from Sheldon and Irene whom I’ve known even longer:

Dear Susie and Steve:Best Wishes on your 40th.What an achievement.What’s this rumour I have been hearing that Susie is being awarded a medal by the Queen?I hope that you two are looking forward to the next 40 as much as Irene and I are to the next 48? (Can you imagine???)Are you getting to see the boys and grandchildren? From what I read, the restrictions in Melbourne are a lot more stringent than here.Once again, congratulations. With love,Irene & Shel

The secret of a happy marriage: marry someone like Susie. On the other hand, as I was relating to friends just yesterday from Woody Allen’s autobiography, he said that his parents were the most badly matched couple in history, like a marriage between Hannah Arendt and Nathan Detroit both of whom I know quite well. In fact, I then sang for all and sundry “Why It’s Good Old Reliable Nathan” which I knew from end to end, to my surprise since once I started I could keep on going through to the end.

On the other hand, I doubt I could quote as extensively from Hannah Arendt, or would want to.

You listening, Dan? Don’t let it dominate our lives. What a wuss he is!

Today, October 4, is our 40th wedding anniversary and other than in dwelling on how many years have gone by, and by mathematical necessity how many are left, I could not be more happy. When I was young, teenager-ish, I came across an article about Charles Boyer’s own 40th anniversary.* Boyer was the ultimate French luuver, and there he had been married to a single person for his entire life, rather than being a man with many women, as is the ideal in these decadent times of ours. And in reply, my mother said that the true sign of a great lover is that he can keep the same woman interested for the whole of her life. In fact, literature, up until that time, was about finding and winning the perfect girl, Romeo and Juliet say. Today, such a notion would not work for Hollywood nor for most “romantic” fiction. Certainly very few boys would buy into it. It is numbers that matter, a Don Giovanni type love-life that counts as the standard of excellence. A bad standard since it is one that leads to so much unhappiness and discontent. Marrying your high school “sweetheart” is the last thing on anyone’s mind for virtually everyone in our Western world today. And not until I have arrived at this moment myself did it really occur to me that this truly is the ideal, just as my Mother had said all those years ago, bless her.

So here we are at 40 years. Alas, were these normal times we would be having a big, big party, bringing together all of our friends, many old who were actually at the wedding, some more recent, and with it being a Sunday we could have started early, gone on all day and kept going deep into the night. But being in the odd times we are, it will just have to be a catered romantic dinner for two around our kitchen table with our children and grandchildren on Zoom.

The story of how we met I have told many times but will tell it again. It was at a Fancy Dress party – on April Fools Day, in fact. I had been invited by an old friend I used to know from my early days in Melbourne. It was a Saturday night and I came dressed as an American tourist, in a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, thongs and a roll of toilet paper in my back pocket. And into this room came the prettiest, most engaging girl I had seen in a very long time who was easily the most enchanting woman I had ever come upon. Upbeat, happy, full of laughter , good vibes, and adventure. She came as a 1920s flapper which she was the perfect embodiment of. She worked the room coming towards where I was, and finally made it to me after about an hour. My eyes had, of course, never left her – and as she tells it herself, she was working her way towards me since I, bless my soul, was her perfect type, at least from a distance. 

We then sat and chatted, talked about this and that – I actually still remember the conversation surprisingly well – and then I offered to drive her home when it was all over, in my beat-up 25-year old Cortina. Which would have been fine except that the car would not start and needed a push-start from everyone else to finally get the engine to turn over. As you may see, she was definitely not looking for wealth and status. So we drove out to the airport and back to charge the engine, and then after a night of more chat and more coffee and cake, we went on the Sunday morning to see her best friends to see how I would fit into her life, and then we went to see my best friends, so that I could do the same. And then we met again on the Monday in the city since we were both working not all that far from each other.

But this morning at work was the moment that mattered. I told the story at our wedding and a number of times since. It is known, and I do mention it from time to time, that before I became the sober man of the right and a proper bourgeoisie, I had been a long-haired hippy new-left loon, even having gone so far as to live in a “commune” in Vancouver, hanging out with all forms of disreputable types, of whom I was amongst the more disreputable. This, mind you, when I had already become a B.A./M.A, but not yet PhD. I was at work in the morning in the Economics Department of one of our Big Four major banks, and I went to the chap who did the mining analysis and forecasts and asked to borrow his copy of the I Ching. The I Ching, if you don’t know it, is an ancient Chinese “oracle” to which you can pose various questions about what to do, and which will provide answers that usually requires a certain kind of wavering judgment and careful interpretation to make sense of. My friend David used the I Ching, along with his astrological charting plus numerology, to make his forecasts for the mining industry. Bear that in mind next time you think about buying shares, whether bank shares or mining shares. I might just mention that he eventually left the bank because he was sure that there was going to be a California earthquake as foretold by Edgar Cayce, that would send a tidal wave across the Pacific leading to mass drownings in Melbourne. David therefore sold up his beautiful house in Carlton and moved to Nimbin. I only once again ever saw him, at an economics conference, where he presented a paper on the use of astrology in making economic forecasts.

But on this day, being already very familiar with the I Ching from my earlier days, I asked to borrow his copy, which is the last time I ever used it or any other form of useless mythological forecasting technique, other than, of course, economic theory. And I asked David for the book and put the fateful question: Should I marry this girl? I might also here mention that I introduced these devices to my children by telling them that they are a fun part of life, but the moment they find even the slightest tweak of a hint of a notion entering their heads that these things might accurately foretell anything, they must be discarded and never ever used again. That is my advice to everyone. Let me now return to that moment in 1978.

And here was the point about the question. I was a young lad, only just having turned thirty. I was living the life that many young lads at that time of life foolishly prefer to live. And having met the perfect girl, the reason I was going into this further investigation of the proper course of action was, I am ashamed to admit, so that I might find some reason, anything at all, where is that straw for me to grasp, not to continue along this path towards marriage, but so that I could have some reason not to. And as you might know with all of these devices, there is a certain fuzziness that allows you to read things in many different ways. An easy way out, right?

I tossed the coins and then the most astonishing thing happened. And this was the only time this had ever happened. It gave me an absolutely clear answer that was unambiguous in stating without any possible way to equivocate: YOU SHOULD MARRY THIS GIRL!

And it was even worse than that. The way the oracle works is that there are almost always “Change Lines” in the result so that what might be the advice at the moment of consultation will over time slither into its opposite or at least towards some other answer. But here, for the first and only time in all the times I had used the I Ching, there were no Change Lines. How it was on that day in 1988 would be how it would be for all times. Honestly, I was truly amazed since nothing like it had ever happened before. It is a rare occurrence, I can tell you.

And so it has turned out. The entire universe in its cosmic unfolding had told me in no uncertain terms that this was the girl I must marry if I sought happiness and a blessed life of marital contentment that would continue forward exactly how it had  begun. I now know this is the only form of true happiness, the only one that counts. The greatest of all of G-d’s blessings and gifts is a happy marriage. 

I will add something else which I have only found out recently, but which when I read it turns out to have been exactly what I had been wending my way towards that moment. And in its own way this is as mystical an approach, and no doubt about as accurate as my tossing the coins to consult the I Ching. This time, however, it is by using advanced statistical methods to find your one true love and companion for life (I think this may only works for males, by the way, but perhaps not). Let me quote the text. This is from Amir D. Aczel: Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market & Just about Everything Else, p86):

“You will maximize your probability of finding the best spouse if you date about thirty-seven percent of the available candidates in your life, and then choose to stay with the next candidate who is better than all the previous ones.

“This is, indeed, a strange-sounding rule. But mathematicians have proved it works better than any other. The number thirty-seven percent is an approximation of the exact number 1/e, where e is the base for natural logarithms, or 2.71828.” 

That is, you must forego the 63% of future possible partners and stop right there and search no further. The science is settled. You don’t want to go around arguing with science, do you?

We have had a remarkably friction-free 40 years, although I do have to say there is that one area where we do not perfectly line up, and as with many couples, it is with politics. We have managed to work it through, but as it turns out, of the two of us, she is the more conservative, the most hardline on the right. I may waver here or there, but she never, and apparently from a very young age. 

There we are in the photo below, me looking as cheerful and debonair as ever.

The only lesson I feel I have learned in all this time is that what is best in life is to turn seventy and find you have been happily married to the same person for the previous forty years. And you only know it once you have done it for yourself.

* Charles Boyer was the husband of British actress Pat Paterson, whom he met at a dinner party in 1934. The two became engaged after two weeks of courtship and were married three months later. The marriage lasted 44 years until her death.

The politics of the President with the Chinese flu are almost impossible to work out. Alive and well and ready for the lead-up to the election!

I understand that journalists at The Oz, and throughout the Murdoch press, must follow the party line, but really, how unbelievably shallow is this from Paul Kelly: Trump v Biden is a clash of lightweights. You want to see a lightweight in action, read this:

Calling Donald Trump a disrupter is a weasel word euphemism. Trump told 80 million Americans in the opening presidential debate that he would not necessarily accept defeat and urged his supporters to “watch” carefully because he would not tolerate a “fraudulent election”.

This constitutes qualified approval to deny the legitimacy of a Joe Biden victory. It violates the constitutional foundations of American democracy and accountability. This stance is indefensible, but nobody should be surprised.

The risk for Trump is that it casts him as a loser. The breaking news that Trump has tested positive for coronavirus is another wildcard in an unpredictable month for America. Trump winning on a sympathy vote? That won’t happen. But the optics of Trump succumbing to the virus cannot help his re-election campaign.

This week Trump opened a dangerous door that should never be opened. Democracies cannot function without accepted transitions of power. In his January 2017 inaugural speech Trump honoured the “peaceful transfer of power” towards himself — now he casts doubt on whether he accepts the “peaceful transfer of power” away from himself.

The so-called political editor of The Oz seems oblivious to the enormous cheating going on in the American electoral process, visible and reported everywhere. More to the point, there has been a four-year effort made to steal the election from Donald Trump who won a smashing victory in 2016, that the Democrats, with both Hilary and Obama in it up to their necks in attempting to overturn the election outcome, even having gone so far as run an impeachment trial just this year, distracting from the President’s efforts to deal with the Chinese virus just as it was beginning to emerge. Does he not know about the efforts made to spy on Donald Trump during the last election? Has he never heard of Comey and the rest of that crew? And this is what he asks, as oblivious to all of the stunning economic and social improvements the President has achieved:

And it raises an intriguing question: why are Australian conservatives so perpetually forgiving of a President who violates virtually every norm of conservative behaviour?

If you don’t know now, it is clear you never will. What an absolute vacuum of political understanding Kelly is:

Neither Trump nor Biden is a suitable candidate for the presidency. They are third-raters in their contrasting ways. The mindless propaganda from their media champions is numbing in its absurdity. These candidates are a sad commentary on US democracy and the Republican and Democratic parties.

Kelly, of course, carries the toxic idiocies of the modern left and cannot see what conservatives find so frightening about this, for example:

For Australia, Biden’s climate change policy may become a decisive event. Every sign is this will become his cause, tied into a post-coronavirus economic recovery agenda. Biden will return America to the Paris climate accord, pledge to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, champion renewables, reach out to China on climate policy, and put the US oil and gas sector under immense pressure.

For us, of course, that is the kind of para that explains why Donald Trump is seen as the last line of defence against an impending disaster. It’s time The Oz gave Kelly the boot.

President Trump Discusses First Presidential Debate With Sean Hannity…

Coronavirus: Donald Trump, Melania test positive to Covid

Does Biden have to go into quarantine too?