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.
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2072 Granger Way