lummi island wine tasting holiday notes
Hours this weekend: Closed for eoy inventory
Thoughts for year’s end
The coalition of Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, forty years of Red State gerrymandering and voter suppression, and strategic doses of election fraud assured Republican control of Congress in the 2024 election. Together with a years-in-the-making Supreme Court of far-right Catholic judges, those Congressional majorities have enabled wanton violation of our Constitution in every sphere of government.
Truth, fiction, and AI have all merged into a constant gale of lies, coverups, brutality, cruelty, and deliberate destruction of American democracy. This has been first year of Heritage Foundation’s detailed plan to turn our country into a White Christian police state somewhere between Nazi Germany and George Orwell’s 1984.
Against these powerful forces, a broad resistance has been evolving across the nation including many lower court decisions, local and state government lawsuits, and mass demonstrations of increasing numbers of citizens across the country.
While for sure it’s been a heartbreaking year, every day bringing more sadistic cruelty, lies, incompetence, and dishonor, the reality of gross negligence and incompetence is creating increasing realization among voters of every stripe including large numbers of independents.
See you next year!
lummi island wine tasting dec 11-12 ’25
Hours this weekend: 4-6 pm Friday & Saturday
Orcas Island lost in layers of grays and lots of rain…
This week’s wine tasting
Christopher Michael Pinot Gris OR $14
Classic, natural peach-skin color with aromas of Anjou pears and white peaches; juicy and plush, with sweet stone-fruit flavors and bright acidity, and a dry, fresh finish.
Phantom Red Blend ’20 WA $17
Petite Sirah/Zin blend delivers rich velvety palate of dark blackberry and boysenberry with peppery notes, balanced structure and plush tannins…a consistent local favorite!
Lovo Fior d’Arancio Sparkling Moscato ’18 Italy $15
A rare clone of Moscato with an unmistakable citrus scent from nearby orange groves; a great holiday dessert wine with refined bubbles, beautiful, pearlescent color, and maybe a dessert all by itself!
Economics of the Heart: The Bad, the Worse, and the Ugly
We are traveling, no essay this week. Suffice it to say that the Bad Guys are getting meaner and more violent, the rich guys are feeling more and more entitled, more and more Americans are digging in and fighting back, and more and more vets are speaking out against the war crimes being committed by the “War Dept” as they murder scores of unnamed people in boats in international waters without an ounce of evidence against them.
It’s more than most Americans are going to stand for. The Tide is turning. Stay safe, warm, and dry!
lummi island wine tasting dec 5-6 ’25
Hours this weekend: 4-6 pm Friday & Saturday
painting by Anne Gibert
This Week’s Wine Tasting
Marchetti Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi Classico ’22 Italy $14
Verdicchio/Malvasia blend from free-run juice; pale straw-green color; intense bouquet of citrus and lemon zest, complex fruity character, and crisp, well-balanced palate.
Perrin CdR Rouge Réserve ’20 France $16
Fresh, bright and fleshy GSM Rhone blend shows peppery aromas and flavors of black cherry and raspberry, finishing warm and long. Excellent value!
Domaine Chibaou Surnaturel Merlot ’20 France $22
Aromas of black fruits, strawberries, and caramel; rich and concentrated, balanced and elegant.
Economics of the Heart: Enough of the People Enough of the Time…
Sure, they look tough… but they don’t pack the gear!
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”
The familiar American myth is that Abraham Lincoln said these wise lines in various places at various times with various wordings.
So it is curiously disappointing to learn that rigorous research concludes that the idea has been around since long before Lincoln, with numerous similar wordings, (including Dubya’s memorable “fool me once shame on you; fool me twice..um..fool me….well, you can’t fool me again!” The point still holds: when facts contradict what politicians have been telling us, they have been lying and it’s time for them to go!
Now a year into the 2024 coup, everyone can see very clearly the blatant corruption and sadistic cruelty of the Project 2025 assault on our 250-yr old democracy. For most of the year, Congressional Republicans have been largely silent and unavailable for comment, making this the most unproductive Congress in history, aka “most Oval Office genuflections in a single year.”
It’s been a long, horrifying year of Congressional rubber-stamping of the Tweetster’s long list of breathtakingly incompetent Cabinet appointees, Musk’s DOGE publicizing of confidential federal records, and Project 2025’s methodical destruction of American democracy.
At the same time, the venerable White House is being ripped to pieces and cheapened to the Tweetster’s tasteless “standards.” Congressional Republicans remain silent and subdued as he cedes Ukraine to Putin, and nod off in their chairs as he hands over our most advanced weapons systems to ruthless Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman (the guy who brought us 9/11 and the brutal murder of Jamal Kashoggi.) Folks, this isn’t a Congress; it’s a retirement home for empty suits.
The sadistic cruelty of Congressional Republicans’ failure to protect our institutions, our people, our Constitution, and their own oaths of office are exacerbated even further by the daily, nation-wide brutality of thousands of armed, masked, warrantless ICE agents. Each day, under orders from Steven Miller, they deliberately violate the Constitutional rights of thousands of legal immigrants and asylum seekers, create chaos across the country (even Lummi Island*) and defy state and federal laws with adolescent impunity.
However, we are seeing many encouraging signs of growing public resistance to the ongoing lies, the corruption, the looting, the cruelty, and the widespread violations of local, state, federal, and international laws by administration officials. These include the illegal murders of scores of unknown, unnamed boat crews by US armed aircraft in neutral waters by American ships and aircraft and their intention to eliminate federal support for the needy altogether in 2027.
Recent polls, election results, and increasing nationwide resistance from lower courts, state governors, AG’s, legislatures, and public events all show growing commitment to preserve our Constitutional rights. These include the calling out of federal overreach by state and local authorities, consistent lower court nixing of unjustifiable/illegal charges against targeted individuals or groups, recent election victories for the rule of law, and increasing political activity of younger voters, including NYC mayor, New Jersey and Virginia governors, and CA Prop 50.
* Last spring some 34 Mexican-origin roofers who regularly worked here on LI were swept up across the County by ICE and “disappeared”)
lummi island wine tasting nov 28-29 ’25
Hours this weekend: 4-6 pm Friday & Saturday
We will be Open Friday and Saturday from 4-6 for wine tasting as usual for anyone so inclined. 🙂
As these shorter, darker, wetter, and gloomier November days keep reminding us, we are less than a month away from Winter Solstice, aka the annual Peak of Gloom, which we curiously celebrate as “Thanksgiving.” It’s a time for warm gatherings, good food with friends, and cozy fires.
This Week’s Wine Tasting
Chapoutier Belleruche Blanc ’23 France $14
Delicious blend of grenache blanc and roussanne; fragrant and perfumed with a light, grilled-lemon note over ripe melon, and a lingering palate of rich white peach.
Argento Malbec ’22 Argentina $13
From organically grown grapes; deep purple hue; inviting aromas of red berries and flowers, and flavors of plum and sweet blackberry; finishes with ripe, balanced tannins– way over-delivers for its modest price.
Jordanov Vranec ’20 Macedonia $18
Aromas of ripe berries with notes of clove, nutmeg and cardamom; full bodied with ripe dark fruit and hints of herbs and dark chocolate on the well-structured finish.
Economics of the Heart: Toward the New Republican Feudalism
courtesy lumenlearning.com
Supposedly Republicans know everything there is to know about wealth and money. They are famous for reducing every complex issue to its ‘bottom line,” i.e. how much profit does it make for them and their cronies in the top .01%?
Curiously, Republicans have thought this way for over a hundred years without learning anything about economics. In particular, they have managed ignore the central importance of the “circular flow” of resources, goods, and services among actual living human beings. The ONLY measure that counts is their profit. Ah, the allure of the feudal manor.
For example, among their many economic idiocies is the notion that “workers” should be paid the absolute minimum for their time and expertise, while management should be paid according to the sales somehow “generated” in their part of the organization.
As Marx observed, every worker adds value to production not only by their skills and expertise, but also by their spending, which generates income for other sellers, which allows them to acquire more resources, make more products and services, and yes, more profit. It is a false sort of “thrift” to suppose that paying workers less than the value they add is going to make the Big Pie any bigger, because everyone is part of the Circular Flow.
Over the past forty years the ownership of wealth in the United States has been increasingly concentrated in the hands of .01% of the population, who invest it in their next profiteering scheme, for which they earn for themselves even more net worth.
The net effect is that vast portions of the population are priced out of essential life-sustaining markets like food, clothing, and shelter. We see this very clearly in the recent deep cuts to school lunch subsidies, increases in homelessness, rising health care costs.
Even more idiotic are Project 2025 threats to cut social security payments to the millions of people who paid into it for decades. As Poirot might say, “No, no, no, mes amis, this reneging on a system that has delivered for Americans for nearly a hundred years is just plain stealing.
What all this constitutes is a giant step back into the Manor System of the feudal Middle Ages, wherein the feudal lords who owned everything hired serfs and villeins by allowing them to live in their manor fiefdoms in exchange for work. They weren’t slaves exactly, nor were they free to come and go as they pleased. Read more.
2072 Granger Way