lummi island wine tasting Oct 3-4 ’25
Hours this weekend: 4-6 pm Friday & Saturday
This week’s wine tasting
Garzon vineyards, Uruguay
Garzon Single Vineyard Albarino ’20 Uruguay $34
Medium-bodied white with dense texture, rich, elegant aromas, and succulent flavors of pineapple, lemon zest, chamomile, sea salt, and stone fruits, with bright, tangy acidity, pleasing creamy texture and deep flavors.
Idilico Monastrell ’22 Washington $19
Known as Mourvèdre in France, Spanish monastrell typically has notes of dark cherry, pepper, and a bit of gaminess, bright acidity, and freshness and low alcohol levels. Fermented on the lees and aged in neutral barrels.
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!
Economics of the Heart: The Silence of the Generals
https://www.stripes.com/
My first reaction to the Tweetster’s summons of America’s top military leaders from across the planet for a face-to-face meeting with him and so-called SecDef Hegseth was a certain paranoia about security. The way the ongoing Project 2025 coup has been going, with roving gangs of anonymous, masked “ICE agents” rounding up and disappearing thousands of people with no legal process, no records, and no accountability, if you’re not a little paranoid, then you haven’t been paying attention.
So it has been easy to imagine various Maga scenarios comparable to Hitler’s Reichstag fire, where in one act of terrorism his Nazis burned down the building that housed the government, suspended civil liberties, and pursued a “ruthless confrontation” that “removed” enough of the Communists (the opposition party) from government to give Hitler dictatorial control of the entire government and set the stage for the international horror of WWII.
Any sudden gathering in one place of pretty much all of our top military leadership from far-flung positions around the world should raise lots of security alarms. But right now we are already up to our waists resisting a long-planned, targeted assault on our Constitution by a coalition of autistic billionaires and white/racist/sexist/male/neo-Christian/anti-abortion nationalists, as we recently discussed here and here.
It was a relief to see that standard military protocols were intact during what turned out to be more the Tweetster’s audience with the nation’s military leaders, not the other way around. Besides the ongoing wreckage of his moment to moment exposition, he also seemed genuinely puzzled by the absence of his cheering, interactive Maga-Rally groupies. These guys were not his usual puppets, and neither he nor the so-called SecDef was prepared for the formal silence of their audience.
All in all it was reassuring to this graybeard Navy vet to observe the quiet formality of these highly experienced and decorated officers at this bizarre event. One comes away with some tentative confidence that our senior military leadership will continue to prioritize the Constitution and the rule of law over the ongoing coup. Most of these people have served in the military for at least 25 years, studied international politics and institutions, are highly trained and experienced, and are well-briefed on our security around the world.
Their contrast with the mindless nonsense from the Tweetster/Hegseth team is deeply encouraging.
See, for example, this thoughtful analysis by Moira Donegan in The Guardian.
lummi island wine tasting sept 26-27 ’25
Hours this weekend: 4-6 pm Friday & Saturday
watercolor by Kim Obbink
This week’s wine tasting
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.
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.
Chehalem Corral Creek Pinot Noir ’21 Oregon $32
Elegant, smooth, complex, and light; bright aromatics of strawberry, cherry, toasted oak and baking spice; long, silky, and juicy palate with soft tannins and lingering flavors of bright red fruit.
Economics of the Heart: Cruelty As Government Policy
The first seeds of Republican Cruelty to hit the mainstream were the radio and TV talk show hosts of the early 90’s. Their lies about Democrats became 24/7 ad hominem insults across the nation on right-wing radio and TV. They laid the groundwork for the nonstop demonizing of the Clinton Administration in general and the Clinton family personally. Those deliberate decisions to stream false and outrageous narratives have been the public face of the Republican Party ever since. Those few with honor are long gone.
Dubya took office in 2001, failed to prevent the 9/11 hijacking attacks, and invaded Iraq and Afghanistan where armies of subcontractors made $billions. Thus began the “War on Terror,” which over the next 20 years put lots of $$ in the hands of billionaire investors, killed or wounded hundreds of thousands of people, and laid the path for a major economic recession just as Dubya left office. The Obama administration stepped in in 2008, made the investments and created the legislation to provide health care to all Americans, bailed out the American automobile industry, took out Osama bin Laden, got the economy back on track…you know, the typical transition from Republican looting to Democratic management.
Since the Tweetster’s Jan 6 2021 coup attempt, however, Republican Maga World has taken us down a very different path toward very different goals. Since then, Republican politicians and backers have turned increasingly to a single strategic goal: replacing Constitutional government with a tyrannical religious state run by a handful of extremely wealthy white men who will own everything and decide everything. There will be no “civil rights” in their neo-feudal system outside the small Elite, only liabilities, and cruelty as we have been seeing since January.
There will be subsistence living for ordinary people in good standing who toe the line. Men will be trained and assigned work according to family status. Women will make and take care of babies, manage households, or otherwise work as assigned. Big Brother will be constantly monitoring what everyone says and does, and violations will bring punishment.
This dystopian picture follows from last week’s post on the research of Matthew Boedy on his forthcoming book “The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy.” That subject came up last week from searches on Charlie Kirk and his “Turning Point USA” crusade. This talk Kirk gave at the 2020 CPAC meeting clarifies what Boedy is warning about the goals of Turning Point and its close relationship with the Christian nationalist New Apostolic Reformation movement (NAR). Btw, the Southern Poverty Law Center characterizes NAR as “the greatest threat to American democracy that most people have never heard of.”
It is appropriate to be concerned that the ongoing coup right now in our country is linked directly not only to Republican elected officials and their selected billionaire funders, but even more deeply to these terrifyingly hateful behind-the-scenes people who have made up their own Christian religion and intend to punish anyone who stands in their way. And who almost certainly are the force behind Project 2025.
The “good news” is that the ongoing Cruelty of Project 2025 is building more resistance against itself every day while the Tweetster is getting crazier and crueler every day, and our place in global politics and trade is slipping as long-time trading partners are taking their business elsewhere.
lummi island wine tasting sept 17 ’25
Hours this weekend: 4-6 pm Friday & Saturday
…September colors across the street and reefnetting gear in Legoe Bay
This week’s wine tasting
Valminor Albarino Rias Baixas ’22 Spain $23
Straw yellow-green color; rich nose of mandarin orange, lime apricot, and peach; floral notes of orange blossom and white flowers with fresh, lively, and full-bodied palate, good structure, well-integrated acidity, decadent, smooth unctuousness.
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.
Shatter Grenache Vin de Pays des Côtes Catalanes ’19 France $19
From Old Vines in Roussillon’s black schist soil; nose of dark fruit with a hint of espresso; velvety texture with black currant, spice and cured meat flavors with a touch of coffee; firm structure, supple tannins, excellent acidity and overall balance.
Wine of the Week: Shatter Grenache Côtes Catalanes ’19 France $19
The wine is made from grenache grown in vineyards located near Maury in the Roussillon region of Southwest France by California winemaker Joel Gott. As it turns out, we were lost for a bit in this very area about ten years ago. We were staying in Lagrasse, at the northern edge of the Corbieres wine region, and drove south through the rugged landscape where centuries ago the heretic Cathars had fortified themselves in remote mountain fortresses to practice their particular form of Catholicism. It’s a long, sad, and brutal story.
As we moved into Roussillon, we found ourselves on a narrow dirt road winding through farmland when the road took a sudden dip onto a Very Narrow one-lane “bridge” close to the water over a narrow canal and with no guard rails, and from our vantage point no clear sense of where it went after that. Eventually we got up the nerve to cross it, and within a half mile came to a major highway along the boundary between Corbieres and Roussillon very close to Maury.
The area is known for its nutrient-poor schist soil which forces vines to grow deep to find nutrients, evoking concentrated flavors. The name Shatter and the bottle photo are an homage to the shattered schist soil. All in all, pretty tasty! We found a handful of bottles in the cellar which will probably disappear quickly!
Economics of the Heart: Project 2025 and the Seven Mountains Mandate
Charlie Kirk, as it turns out, had been playing a pivotal role in Project 2025 to replace American democracy with a particularly racist, sexist form of White Christian feudalism for a couple of years. As laid out in detail in the forthcoming (Oct 1) Seven Mountains Mandate (SMM) by Matthew Boedy, an English professor at the University of North Georgia, Kirk had been the key operative in recruiting students around the country.
Boedy makes the case that Kirk modeled his Turning Point USA as a strategy to take over all of the seven key spheres of influence: Education, Government, Religion, Family, Business, Media, and Entertainment–pretty much everything human beings do. The SMM has become especially influential in the New Apostolic Reformation, a loose network of charismatic, Christian nationalist churches with their own self-proclaimed prophets.
All of this ties in perfectly with the 50-yr machinations of the Heritage Foundation, which authored thousands of pages of legislation passed by Republican Presidents since Reagan. Project 2025 is a comprehensive blueprint for ending American democracy and replacing it with a “Christian” state unaffiliated with any known Protestant religion. On the contrary, it has all the earmarks of every authoritarian government: to stay in power indefinitely, have low tolerance for dissent or disagreement, and to accumulate vast personal wealth. Think Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Hirohito’s Japan, Franco’s Spain. In a certain sense, autocracy is the new feudalism, the default setting for any nation where power and wealth are concentrated in very few hands.
Here in America the current coup has been decades in the making by a handful of multi-billionaires who have been playing a very long game to get to this moment. They got their foot in the door with Reagan, who passed most of their proposed legislation, including in particular doing away with the FCC rule requiring all sides of any broadcast, and cemented their position by loading the Supreme Court with business-friendly Catholic Justices who do what they are told.
The 2025 political climate is changing how people relate in lots of ways. This article in the Guardian creeps around the mind games now happening at the high school level as many boys are leaning more to the right, and girls to the left. That makes many girls, who are more liberal than today’s boys, feel uncertain about the current politics of conversation, sensing social pressure to remain passive in the face of offensive remarks. The private tensions caused by the growing authoritarianism are seeping into social fears and behavior at every age.
Another harbinger of the moment is the recent blowback against comedy host Jimmy Kimmel for a brief comment about Charlie Kirk’s onstage murder in Utah. The Producers Guild of America said in a statement on Instagram: “Free speech is fundamental to our democracy…late-night television has long been a space where satire and commentary contribute to our national dialogue. We believe that artistic expression is essential, and that critical voices must not be silenced.” It is, of course, classic Republican Hypocrisy to accuse Dems for occasionally doing what R’s do habitually.
And then, of course there is still the ongoing matter of warrantless arrests and disappearing of foreign citizens who have appropriate documentation to be in the US. This brief video shows a young Turkish woman, attending Tufts University as a doctoral student, being detained by ICE in Boston and immediately flown to detention in Louisiana with no due process. video link (scroll to bottom)
lummi island wine tasting Sept 12-13 ’25
Hours this weekend: 4-6 pm Friday & Saturday
Two old watches I posted on the Blizard Trail charm pole some while back…
now they’re gone!! Is that legal???
This week’s wine tasting
Cloudlift chardonnay ’22 Washington $28
Scents of honeysuckle, sweet lemon curd, and pear drift out of the glass, with mouth watering acidity carrying flavors of crisp green apple and pear with a burst of lemon zest on the finish.
Wolftrap Red ’24 South Africa $14
Consistently appealing aromas and flavors of ripe plum, red currant, violets, Italian herbs and exotic spices; vibrant flavors of dark berries and spicy plum with hints of orange peel that linger on a juicy finish. Terrific value!
Alain de la Treille Chinon Cab Franc ’22 France $21
From Loire valley’s alluvial gravel & yellow limestone terraces cultivated along the Vienne for five generations; offers complex minerality and juicy, spicy flavors that dance from plum to cassis, game, earth, and tobacco, all with a delicacy that speaks of the village’s cool conditions.
Economics of the Heart: Maggits Go Full “Reichstag Fire”
Yesterday’s very public murder of 31-yr old Republican activist Charlie Kirk has focused global attention on the growing violence in American politics. Kirk was fatally shot while speaking at a well-attended event on the campus of Utah Valley University near Salt Lake City. Kirk had been a Republican activist for about two years, and had been quite effective at building Maggit support among college students.
Almost immediately the usual Republican pundits starting accusing Democrats for the escalation of violence and calling for Maga-retaliation. Remember, these are the same guys who cheered the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol, the warrantless arrests and “disappearing” of tens of thousands of asylum-seeking immigrants, the deployment of the National Guard to LA, and the Tweetster’s threat to do the same in Chicago and other “Blue” cities in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.
All of this closely mimics the actions of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in February 1933. Just four weeks after Hitler managed to make himself Chancellor of Germany, an arsonist attack on the Reichstag building, which housed the German Parliament, was burned to the ground. Hitler blamed the fire on the Communists (the opposition party to the Nazis), suspended civil liberties, and pursued a “ruthless confrontation” that “removed” enough of the Communists from government to give Hitler complete control of the entire government and set the stage for WWII.
Fast forward to today: Project 2025 is the Maggit Reichstag fire. The Tweetster is the Maggit wannabe Hitler. A bunch of white male “high-functioning” autistic billionaires are putting up the money and giving the orders. And the United States is being ripped apart a nickel at a time by a Cabinet and a Republican-controlled Congress of gutless sycophants.
The Rise of Political Violence in the US.
As we have seen over and over since January, Congressional Republicans have quietly capitulated to the Tweetster’s authority over them and Project 2025’s detailed plan for turning the United States into an Authoritarian dictatorship. They are drastically changing economic rules to make the richest men in the world even richer, the poorest even poorer, the environment more toxic faster, and putting a “Closed” sign on our influence on the international economy. And all of this has been unfolding right before our eyes since 2015, as described in considerable detail in Rachel Kleinfeld’s very detailed 2021 and 2024 studies of the subject. She is a widely published and highly respected researcher with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; the two articles listed here provide a detailed analysis of the rise of political violence in wealthy democracies. The abstract of the 2021 paper begins with this:
“Recent alterations to violent groups in the United States and to the composition of the two main political parties have created a latent force for violence that can be 1) triggered by a variety of social events that touch on a number of interrelated identities; or 2) purposefully ignited for partisan political purposes. This essay describes the history of such forces in the U.S., shares the risk factors for election violence globally and how they are trending in the U.S., and concludes with some potential paths to mitigate the problem.”
She identifies two subgroups most prone to far-right political violence. The first consists of white Christian evangelical Republicans, who portray Democrats and cultural elites as Satanic forces arrayed against Christianity and seeking to harm Christian children. “They often hold jobs, are married, and have children. Those who attend church or belong to community groups are more likely to hold violent, conspiratorial beliefs.4 These are not isolated “lone wolves”; they are part of a broad community that echoes their conspiratorial beliefs in a Q-Anon conspiracy.
The second subgroup consists of those who feel threatened by either women or minorities, and are particularly concerned that the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast” that they “may have to use force to save it.” The article describes in detail what is essentially a broad sort of existential paranoia that their “traditional values” are being taken away and a resultant willingness or even compulsion to use any means to stop them including murder.
We have seen over the past eight years how the Maggit false narrative media machine speaks directly to this kind of socio-religious paranoia. It has been deliberate and well-planned, beginning with the elimination of broadcast requirements to present all sides of every story, taking religious control of Congress and the Supreme Court, and turning our country from a democracy to some dystopian Christian nightmare.
2072 Granger Way