lummi island wine tasting jul 10 ’20

Posted at July 9, 2020

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Phase II Wine Ops

For the past couple of months we have been exploring whether we could move some semblance of our usual weekly wine tastings to the ferry overflow parking lot for a couple of hours on Friday afternoons. Since Janice had already established the venue for weekly Bread Pickup and Happy Hour, it seemed worth a try. But after some reflection on how that has gone, we have decided NOT to continue the practice. Instead, we will drop down to pick up our bread, put out our chairs, and join you to  schmooze, share a little wine, and visit in the relative safety of the spacious outdoor setting.

Over the next week or so we will be setting up the wine shop entrance area to accommodate half-hour Saturday afternoon outdoor wine tasting appointments for groups of up to three people at a time. There will be the usual tasting fee of $5 for members, $10 for non-members. Social distancing is required, and masks are encouraged. More on this next week!

 

Ordering Wine

While the Shutdown continues, we hope you will all continue to think of us for your wine shopping while Covid keeps our shop closed. You can phone or email wine orders for pickup here at the wine shop or delivery at Friday Bread Pickup. Just click on the “Order Wine” heading at the top of this page for a partial list of our current offerings.

When you have made selections, you can submit an order as follows:

It’s that Simple! Operators are Standing By!

 

 

 

Jay Inslee, Paul Simon, and E. O. Wilson

We took time to watch a special Zoom event on Monday evening featuring our Governor Jay Inslee and music icon Paul Simon, who sang several of his iconic songs (American Tune, Homeward Bound). Mostly the hour-long session was a conversation between them about climate change, politics, and art.

Simon has been an active advocate for global cooperation to save our Planet from the mass extinctions that climate change is already causing, and which will get worse at an increasing rate if we humans do not immediately start rolling back carbon emissions. He is a strong advocate and supporter of the ideas of biologist E. O. Wilson (see photo, left), including his Half-Earth proposal: “By setting aside half the planet in reserve, we can save the living part of the environment and achieve the stabilization required for our own survival.” Read more

Their conversation was notably positive and hopeful, despite the array of Deep Holes we humans seem to have put ourselves into, discussing the roles of artists in inspiring us to our better selves, and the array of man-made challenges threatening the very existence of Life on Earth. The great Takeaway from their mutual positivity and determination was a feeling like Obama’s inspiring “Yes, we can” speech. We don’t know what is going to happen in the future. There are a lot of Threats to everything we hold dear, and solid ground is hard to find these days. We have some tough choices ahead.

 

Mar a Lago Update: Shifting Gears

I began this part of the weekly blog in February 2017 as a small but ongoing commitment to Resist accepting that a psychopathic narcissist had been the winner of a fair election. I still don’t believe it, just as I don’t believe Dubya was actually “elected” in either 2000 or 2004. And I believe that Obama only won in 2008 because more people turned out to vote for him than the Republican gerrymandered, voting machine-rigged 4% advantage that they had built into the system over many years.

As part of those concerns, in about 2002 I discovered an organization called verifiedvoting.org, dedicated to making every vote verifiable everywhere in the country. They discovered major vulnerabilities in voting machines, conflicts of interest with politicians involved with particular voting machine manufacturers, and many more. Over all these years the organization has sought one universal metric for all voting systems: that every ballot cast should have a verifiable paper trail to assure that every individual vote actually reflects the intention of the person authorized to cast it.

In fact, it isn’t all that difficult to design such a voting system. The one we use right here in Washington does a pretty good job of providing a paper audit trail for each vote cast. But lots of states (especially Red ones) use machines that provide no such trail, and which are easily hacked or falsified by either outsiders or insiders. In addition, of course we know that it is common practice in many Red states to make voting either impossible or very difficult in Democratic districts by reducing both the overall numbers and the hours of operation of polling places to cause long waiting lines in Democratic districts and the opposite in Republican ones. In addition it has become common practice in many Red States to remove vast numbers of legal Democratic voters from the rolls.

As we go to press here on July 9, we are now fewer than four months away from the next National election. The coronavirus has placed a major Damper on likely voter turnout at the polls and increased likely demand for absentee ballots, which, like our ordinary ballots in Washington, are sent out and returned by mail. However, Republicans around the nation are lining up against absentee ballots, claiming they are unreliable and subject to falsification and forgery.

In fact, it is exactly the opposite: universal use of mail-in ballots would make voting both more inclusive and more accurate. So let’s all pay attention to the discussion over the next few months about how individual states handle their voting. It will say a lot about institutional Integrity.

 

 

Wine Tasting

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