Teeny Wahini

Given Tuesday’s result, I will be surprised if the United States – in the long run – hangs onto its constitutional republic. This separation-of-powers business in Washington only works for a people with an attention span & a sound working knowledge of the world. It requires a political class & judiciary that are committed to doing right by the people while honoring their wishes & looking out for their interests. We don't have that today & won't for at least the next two years. Tuesday was a great day for the woke globalists in America & they are giddy about it. Suffice it to say the people who voted for them are about to find out they are at the bottom of their priority list. Democrats have much bigger fish to fry, & their to-do list doesn’t involve making the average American happy. These are politicians who do things to you, not for you, so get ready to pay for what you've done. The problem on the Democratic end involves too many who see abundance & prosperity & think government should just take it & give it to everybody. They have no plan for the future beyond eating the seed corn & burning the furniture for heat. People like this will never build anything great, let alone a country with a future. And what can you say about Congressional Republicans other than they are a disgrace & an embarrassment. Trump won a third election in 2024 with 77.3M votes, with a couple busloads of GOP candidates riding his coattails into Congress. They proceeded to substitute their judgement for the wishes of the tens of millions who voted for the President’s agenda, obstructing it every step of the way till they could safely hand off power to their Uniparty friends across the aisle. This is straight-up sabotage from within. All concerned deserve to be primaried right off the ticket & out of the GOP in time for 2028. As for holding the constitutional republic together, a President with a serious, ambitious agenda will need time to execute it. Your country isn’t going to amount to much if your dithering electorate insists on whip-sawing from one extreme to the other every two years. How many of these Republican voters with their noses out of joint over inflation arising from neutralizing Iran have actually looked into why Trump acted like he did when he did? How many actually took time to investigate what this militant, fanatical country of 70M had planned for the rest of humanity? In keeping with the dictum that no good deed goes unpunished, Iran has been put in a wheelchair, so, of course, you have the people benefitting from this arrangement gainsaying this gift of security by suggesting maybe we didn’t have to kick the hell out of them after all. Again, this is the same new generation of voters who like the idea of having their cake & eating it too, because – according to their magical thinking – we should be able to have it all & it should be free. That's what their professors tell them. Like everything else, they think liberty & security should be free too, so why is President Trump doing this to us & creating all this awful (& temporary) inflation? So, the same people who provided Trump his landslide in 2024 decided Tuesday to “send a message” to the White House. They shouldn’t be surprised if the exercise ends with a hot poker up their ass, because that’s usually what happens, in the end, to foolish people. 🇺🇸

Democrats have been making trouble for the U.S. & everybody else for the past 176 years. The issues have changed but their successors remain as reckless & lawless as ever. This is no accident. I think the mentality of slave ownership & all it represents can be abstracted, carried forward, & applied to other criminal avenues of illicit acquisition & ownership, as provided for in the present by the playbook for communist insurgencies. The spirit of the Democratic Party has attracted these difficult personalities through numerous incarnations through the years. History may not repeat itself. But, on occasion, it rhymes. Does anybody doubt – with their talk of Stalinist show trials & avowed determination to hound this President through his final two years of office – that these people wouldn’t gulag you in a slave camp, run more or less on the same principles as an antebellum plantation? It’s a political cult for high-handed, pushy individuals --increasingly sociopathic -- with unwholesome motivations who accept sludge as culture & filth as an occasion for pronouns & grooming our children. 🇺🇸

Such a difficult time to run a climate grift. The bed-wetters can’t buy a break. A little better than two weeks ago, this “expert” on CBC radio warned that this fall’s “super el Nino” in the Pacific is going to clobber us all; it's going to play havoc & -- since then – nothing but blue skies & pleasant fall weather. I think there’s been one cloudy afternoon in my neighborhood since. The really nice weather, in fact, has become monotonous. This is not a symptom of weather systems in crisis – quite the opposite -- so I don’t exactly understand where this hysteria is coming from. Meanwhile – other than dry parts of the west that needed rain anyway – there’s no sign “Super el Nino” is going to give us trouble. As for the Atlantic storm season, Grok just called in the following: “The 2026 Atlantic hurricane season has been one of the quietest on record, especially in intensity, ranking well below average in both frequency and (especially) overall activity.” Don’t ask the President about it. He’d probably take credit for it, although all of this is happening on his watch. If you get blamed for the negative, why shouldn’t you take credit for the positive? Let’s be fair & consistent here. 🇺🇸 🇨🇦🌞🎙️

Working through an experiment in the kitchen this afternoon that is producing some satisfying results. On the menu today is a mittful of raw Pacific white shrimp in 9 fl. ounces of Blue Dragon-brand Thai Red Curry Paste, consisting of about 20 carefully-balanced herbs & spices. They have been blended with a regulation box of Catelli whole-wheat rotini in a novel way that really enhances the dining experience. I first boiled about 4 cups of water, threw in the raw shrimp, turned off the heat, put the lid on & let the assemblage simmer & chill till the shrimp is just right – parboiled plus a titch. You remove the shrimp from the pot & set aside to cool but you keep the broth & dump it into the pot where you boil your rotini pasta. Just top it up enough to comfortably boil the noodles with little water remaining as surplus. Drain the noodles, but again retain the broth. Empty the curry into your boiled noodles. Stir in a tablespoon of butter. A teaspoon or so of curry inevitably clings to the inside of the jar so the best way to extract this is to dump 6 ounces of hot shrimp broth in, tighten the lid, give the contents a shake, then dump the sauce in with the noodles. Notice how everything is infused with shrimp. And boy, does it ever taste like it. It’s so shrimpy, I’m hitting forkfuls with dashes of Old Bay to see how that fits. Try it sometime when the stars align in your kitchen. You will be deliciously rewarded.😋🦐🥒

There, fixed it for you. Pro tip: Canadians are a simple people. They need these things spelled out. Also, the border around this doodle is crooked. Maybe learn to draw a square before taking on political issues you know nothing about. @globeandmail @deAdder 🇺🇸🇨🇦🎃

Great Halloweens: Dive bar Scarberia, early 1980s; Crowd loses it when Frankie Venom, high on something, delivers killer Lucy Potato. 🇨🇦🎸🥔🎃

I make time at Halloween for scary cinema. Turner Classic Movies has a full slate today, including the excellent The Haunting (1963) starring Richard Johnson, Julie Harris & Claire Bloom. I remember, as a child, watching The Haunting on TV but I had to change the channel because it was too intense & creepy. The few times I’ve watched it since, I’ve been impressed how director Robert Wise sustains the dread of a badly haunted mansion without parading demons & goblins across the screen. It’s all done expertly with sound effects, creepy architecture, fine acting & menacing atmospherics. The Haunting tenses you up in your chair & keeps you that way till the end. Fun fact: At the start of Rob Zombie’s rocker Devil Man, we hear a plummy, cultured voice say “Look, I know the supernatural is something that isn’t supposed to happen but it does happen.” That’s Richard Johnson in The Haunting as Dr. John Markway, an investigator of paranormal phenomenon as he prepares to camp out at the haunted mansion in question. That’s 4:30 p.m. on TCM. If you make time for it, prepare for an unsettling experience. After The Haunting comes Curse of the Demon (1957) starring Dana Andrews. If you like scary beings up on the screen at Halloween, this one will be to your liking as well.📽️👻👹🎃

Know what else you can pick up in a pick-up bar? Dancing skills. She's all right. Puts it down like a boss.💃🎃

Notice Canada isn't on the list. Why? Because if there's trouble, Canadians know Uncle Sam will take care of it. 🇺🇸🇨🇦🍺🦫🦅

One of the best songs ever written, a great composition evoking the spirit of the Old West. Look at that guy with the maracas. Just sellin' it. This musical interlude was brought to you by GERITOL -- "Make every day count." 🇺🇸🎸🪇👻🐎🎃

Some have expressed confusion about this idea of “the continuity of history” & how this is a way of reading & slotting events in their respective streams of what came before & afterward with an eye to discerning cause-&-effect. I get it. You think a certain way about things for a long time & you eventually just assume everybody thinks that way too. So, a quick example: Prohibition was imposed on the United States in 1920 with the best of intentions. In its way, Prohibition was a kind of proto-woke initiative, pushed hard by zealous, progressive women who had their reasons, one of them being drunkard husbands who were poor providers & who abused their wives when they complained that the children were hungry & had no shoes. Unfortunately for the do-gooders, Prohibition is not going to be popular in a working-class town like Chicago where men under harsh conditions & long hours labored in factories, steel mills & stockyards where 38,000 hogs, sheep & cattle were slaughtered & processed on a typical day at the end of the First World War. At the end of a shift, these men – tired & dirty – will want a little something to take the edge off before heading for supper & they weren’t to be denied. Needless to say, Prohibition didn’t stick in Chicago &, before long, the money it generated produced powerful, violent gangs who were determined to give the people what they wanted. Mob boss Al Capone basically ran the city at the peak of his power before the federal gov’t took him down on charges of tax evasion. His corrupting influence reached everywhere – into city hall, the police, the courts, the state gov’t, etc. As a result of Prohibition, corrupting influences sunk their hooks so deeply into Illinois’s civic culture that – despite determined efforts to uproot it -- nobody has really been able to make a serious dent in the problem. In Illinois, government, as most people understand it, has stabilized as a hybrid arrangement with civic-criminal characteristics. Illinois has a history of senior officials – including four governors – going to jail for assorted offences since Prohibition. Nearly 20 judges have also been kicked off the bench for being part of Illinois’s corrupt, felonious power structure. And this stubborn, unfortunate contamination of criminality helps explain why – every time you look up – some knuckle-dragging brute from the governor’s mansion in Springfield is making blunt, menacing threats to others even while he & his machine go about the squalid, criminal business of rigging the next election in their favor. They run their state into the ground & -- funny – never pay a price for that at the ballot box. Because that’s exactly what people will vote for every time if given the chance. Thus the state that gave us Abraham Lincoln now gives us thuggish statesmen like Gov. Pritzker, who throws around threats like a mob enforcer. You can practically read Illinois’s tortured history of criminality in Pritzker’s features, arising, as a consequence, of “the continuity of history.” 🇺🇸 💰🍺 🐖🐑🐂

Give that judge a medal. Wiped the smirk off her face. "Hey mom, remember that time they slapped your ass in jail for three months while I was on trial for killing that guy when I was pissed up? Yeah, that was pretty funny. Look everybody -- my mom's a jailbird.." "Shut up, junior..." 🇺🇸👩‍⚖️🎖️🍺😄

And there you have it. Let me tell you, those free-range oofs restored my faith in eggs. Thick, eggy yolks while the whites -- the albumen -- fluffed up in a chewy manner that was also very eggy. Ate the lot with a shot of homemade ketchup, spicy & sweet, & a couple fermented dills on the side. Traditional food continues to taste very delicious & nutritious & is popular during this Oktoberfest celebration. Prosit.😋🍳🐖🍅🥒🍺🥳🎃

Four free-range eggs on deck. As you can see, the honey garlic sausage is givin' `er in some high-smoke ghee, a nasty imported animal grease you can weld in. 😋🐖🍳

Oh boy. Somebody's hungry for eggs. I'll let you know how that goes.😋🍳🥒🍞🥓🎃