lummi island wine tasting Feb 20, ’26
Open Fridays thru February 4-6 pm
Arrr, maties, we be waitin’ for ya so come on by…!
This week’s wine tasting
Valminor Albarino Rias Baixas ’22 Spain $23
Straw yellow-green; nose of mandarin orange, lime, apricot, and orange blossom, with fresh, lively, and full-bodied palate, good structure, well-integrated acidity, and a decadent, lingering unctuousness.
Chiarlo Le Orme Barbera d’Asti Italy $23
Ruby red with hues of violet; elegant and intense aromas, with notes of fresh cherry and currant; harmonious palate, with good structure and roundness, beautiful savory finish, and a local favorite!
Greenwing Columbia Valley Cab Sauv ’21 WA $
Alluring aromas of Bing cherry, rooibos tea, loamy earth with hints of cinnamon, clove, and wild herbs; palate of red currant, raspberry and wild strawberry, fine-grained tannins and bright acidity.
Economics of the Heart: Religionification of Cruelty
Since 2017 many of us have been ranting more or less constantly about the (to coin a word) Religionification of Cruelty by the Republican Party. This has been going on, of course, for decades, with roots going back to the Civil War, plantation owners’ God-given entitlement to own, confine, punish, beat, and murder specific other human beings whom they considered Inferior. There’s a name for this: sadistic psychopathy.
My Catholic School experiences through second grade sometimes inspired horrific nightmares of burning endlessly in Hell or Purgatory if you happened to die between visits to the confessional. So that was pretty weird for a little kid.
Switching to public school in third grade was like being freed from some weird kind of dungeon. And although I had deep affection for the young and kindly nun who was my teacher in “subprimary” and 1st grade, the dimly lit stone corridors and black-robed nuns of that old school evoked lots of troubled dreams.
One positive part of the Catholic school experience was that as kids we had no exposure at all to the Old Testament, except as historical literature. Sermons were usually based on some phrase from the gospels or epistles, with emphasis on the value of kindness and good deeds. In contrast, the constant media presence of self-righteous, angry white men on both radio and TV more or less constantly since the 50’s was always baffling.
We now know pretty much for certain that those behaviors for all these decades are a particularly American kind of political theater with the single goal of creating personal wealth and public stature for its purveyors. That seems to include most current Republican politicians, the Maggits in particular, and Old Testament-toting purveyors of Project 2025 and its “Christian Nationalist” white supremacist underbelly. Their “Old Testament Jesus” they transformed away from the image of an enlightened being who recognizes the sacred nature of all sentient beings to a white, racist, slave-owning pragmatist who can easily be manipulated by and for the Very Rich.
Therefore it is with a mixture of baffled astonishment, hopeful excitement, and new possibilities for the future that we welcome the unlikely, sudden, and timely emergence of Wild Card Texas Candidate and state legislator James Talarico into national politics as a candidate for the same Senate seat being sought by wildly popular Texas Congressional Representative Jasmine Crockett.
The tremendously exciting thing about Talarico’s very recent interview with Stephen Colbert is that with his simple act of bringing public attention to the fact that though Jesus taught the way of kindness, compassion, love, patience, clarity, and forgiveness, he wasn’t a big fan of the mean-spirited money lenders.
That is, everything Maga is about cruelty, brutality, lying, stealing, and destruction. Talarico, a seminarian, has a gentle innocence and credibility when he calls out the sadistic cruelty, dishonesty, and selfishness of the Maga government. While he seems unlikely to beat Crockett in a primary, his simple message could still resonate enough with the public’s collective consciousness to make a difference in this year’s election.
Fingers crossed!
for the first in my recorded history a national political voice has said what I have been ranting about this entire Maga nightmare: that its entire mission is to take us all back to 1860.
lummi island wine tasting Feb 13, ’26
Open Fridays thru February 4-6 pm
And yup, it’ll still be wintah for all of ’em!
photo courtesy of dreamstime.com
This week’s wine tasting
Bodega Garzon Tannat Reserve ’18 Uruguay $15
Opaque deep, dark red; opens with enticing, delicious aromas of very ripe, dark fruit and berries stewed in their own liqueur, with lingering notes of spice, herb, and licorice on the seamless finish.
Decoy Red ’21 California $18
60% Cab, 40% Merlot, & splashes of Zin and Syrah; nose of blackberry, dark plum, spice and herbs; fresh, rich, and savory with rich,silky tannins, bright acidity and long, lush finish.
Antonio Sanguineti Passo Santo White Dessert Wine Italy $18
Passo Santo (“blessed moment”) light dessert wine with notes of toasted hazelnuts, caramel, honey, and dried apricot, great with rich biscotti or crème brûlée, and zingy enough to pair nicely with cheese at the end of a meal.
Economics of the Heart: The Other Approach to Climate Change
In summer of 1980 ( omg, 45 years ago!) I spent the summer at Battelle labs in Richland working on a project funded by DOE on the economic impact of carbon-induced climate change. That was very early in the climate game. I had a paper published on my piece of the work the following year (an early look at possible impacts on fisheries), which led about a year later to a call from CBC in Toronto for an on-air interview. ( fisheries have long been a Big part of the Canadian economy)
The last question in the interview was about what happens next, and my immediate guess was that given the $value of fossil fuels in the global economy, the fossil fuel producers would continue to make progress difficult. Well, that turned out to be the understatement of the century!
Fast forward to today, and the Tweetster’s cozy arrangements with BIG $Donors in the energy biz led to an article in today’s NYT announcing his unilateral sh*t-canning of the global scientific consensus that climate change endangers all life on Earth.
Roughly translated, such a policy would end, in the largest national economy in the world, all efforts to slow and reverse the carbon-caused destruction of environmental and ecosystems quality that we know with certainty has followed from massive increases in expansion of global population and industrial production, and which is killing our planet.
The graph above shows that the problem is not just that global population of human beings has been increasing rapidly since the end of WWII. It’s that energy production has been increasing along with it.
So…maybe increasing fossil fuel production is just the autistic billionaires’ logical notion of a better world for fewer people. So hey, instead of turning toward green energy and a better world for billions, if enough people just, um, “went away,” the surviving trillionaire-igarchs would have their perfect world. You know, with more energy left over to keep Bitcoin and AI growing.
lummi island wine tasting Feb 6 ’26
February Schedule!
We will be OPEN for wine tasting and bread pickup each Friday in February, 4-6 pm (6, 13, 20, and 27)
Me, and my Sha-dow…underneath the ….
This week’s wine tasting
Tre Donne Roero Arneis ’23 Italy $21
Pale golden yellow; soft aromas of orange blossom, honeysuckle, nectarine, and lemon verbena; flavors of pear, peach, quince, and green apple; enduring minerality and balanced acidity.
Angeline Cab Sauv ’23 California $16
Fruit-forward with aromas of lush cherry, cassis, rich cherry, and plum flavors with hints of vanilla and soft oak that over-deliver for the modest price.
Hess Paso Robles Cab Sauv ’21 California $26
Intense aromas of bright red cherry and raspberry, followed by notes of cedar and black pepper accompanied by layers of juicy, full raspberry notes, smooth tannins, and lingering finish of chocolate and roasted espresso. Nice!
Economics of the Heart: Constitutional Humanism
The rebellion of Minneapolis residents against the chaotic invasion of “ICE,” (Project 2025’s version of the Nazi SS) has cast a global spotlight on its warrantless brutality and breathtaking violations of Constitutional rights to due process of citizens, refugees, visitors, and families of every nationality, race, religion, and net worth. The Tweetster’s insatiable need to make people suffer seems to drive everything he does, from insulting press agents aboard Air Force 1 to watching ICE actually murder people.
ICE has been turned into a semi-secret, Federal, paramilitary “police force” whose sole purpose is to intimidate the public with armed, masked, nameless, agents deliberately violating, for political and financial purposes, the Constitutional rights of American citizens and visitors and without cause or warrant, demeaning, detaining, beating, scaring, and disappearing ordinary citizens and legal visitors for simply going about their business.
The entire nation has been awakened by the breathtaking cruelty and indifference of Administration officials associated with law enforcement, who all appear to share a general hatred, disgust, and anger against immigrants, women, non-whites, the better-educated, and the poor.
By the way, speaking of money, the “Big Beautiful Bill” passed by Republicans transfers hundreds of billions of dollars from the bottom 90% of individuals and families to the .01% at the very top, making it the largest transfer of wealth from poorest to richest in American history:
- helping the richest get even richer with huge tax cuts
- cutting federal programs that help the poor (like school lunches); and
- raising tariffs which cost the poor a larger proportion of their income.
The Minnesota ICE invasion was supposedly aimed at the large population of Somali immigrants who had escaped from persecution and violence and have established a respected and valued presence in the state. But also, of course, the ICE raids are serve to sow enough chaos, anxiety, and fear to declare Martial Law. The goal seems to be to create enough chaos in enough cities by next summer to justify declaring martial law across the country. A federal takeover of election administration seems to be the goal.
Even now we are all experiencing the dysphoria of a tyrannical Executive branch, a Congressional majority of “sit back, shut up, and don’t rock the boat,” and a rogue Supreme Court of uncertain loyalties. And that has awakened millions of Americans to the existential crisis we are facing…beginning with protecting this year’s election from Federal interference.
At root, this Administration and Project 2025 which drives it have consistently exhibited a strange overlap with the belief that white, wealthy, Christian men are privileged above women, men of other races, or those with less wealth or property, all of whom properly exist in complete subordination to them. This is precisely the massive hubris which Jefferson called a “wall of separation between Church & State,” a concept earlier promoted by Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke.
Jefferson and Locke were right— when religion intrudes into politics, all reason takes a back seat to hubris, greed, and ego.
lummi island wine tasting schedule update jan 30 ’26
Schedule thru Feb ’26
- We are closed this weekend (Jan 29) for both bread pickup and wine tasting.
- We do plan to be open for both bread pickup and wine tasting all four Fridays in February from 4-6 pm:
- Feb 6, 13, 20, and 27
Some people prefer Saturday afternoons when the weather gets warmer….!
This week’s wine tasting
CLOSED
Economics of the Heart: Cruelty Is Never Justified
courtesy financialexpress.com
The past several months have evoked a broad and growing national realization that Project 2025 has moved ahead to the next phase of its destruction and looting of the United States government, assets, offices, employees, and data while violating every aspect of our 250-yr old Constitution.
Metaphorically, the ship’s rats have taken over the bridge, shut down the engines, and stopped navigating altogether while the ship is systematically looted, crew members thrown overboard, and all radio contact reduced to “sorry, no one is here to take your call.”
The emotional tone set by this so-called administration, cabinet officers, and public faces is blase, uninformed, unconcerned, grumpy, and rude. Nowhere has this been more conspicuous than in the sadistic cruelty of ICE beatings, murders, torture, imprisonment, and disappearing of tens of thousands of immigrants– including citizens– in flagrant disregard for both established law and common decency.
All of this stinks of the same sadistic cruelty as Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and a host of lesser autocrats over many centuries. We have all seen clearly that this is not just political aspiration to lead. It is the sadistic rage of children with a deep grievance that can never be resolved except by hurting others in the same way. And even that satisfaction is fleeting. We are talking about the Tweetster, of course, but also and especially Steven Miller, whose hatred of immigrants is so obviously virulent that it seems to have consumed him for his entire life.
All of this is the backdrop for the present moment in American politics. The many and ongoing excesses of this heartless government have been creeping into public consciousness over the past several months. But they have now exploded into national awareness in the last two weeks with the senseless brutality of federal ICE agents in Minneapolis who murdered two ordinary, law-abiding citizens for no reason whatsoever except the out-of-control sadistic psychopathy of the agents and those who direct them.
The main components of sadism include the intention to harm others, deriving pleasure in inflicting pain on them, and a complete lack of regret. A sadist, by definition, feels pleasure from intentionally causing physical and psychological harm to others and willfully persists in such behavior. Many of the personalities in this administration’s so-called “Cabinet” may qualify as “sadistic psychopaths” besides the Tweetster and Miller, like Hegseth, Bondi, Noem, and Patel, among others. (imho…)
This second year of illegal ICE deployments of thousands of agents into American cities and towns is violently hauling people away with neither warrants or due process with amplified brutality. Most likely, these lawless escalations of brutality are intended to evoke enough resistance to justify inciting the Insurrection Act and declaring Martial Law…an outcome, to borrow a favorite phrase, “most devoutly to be eschewed.”
Keep the faith…
2072 Granger Way
