lummi island wine tasting June 21-22 ’24 summer solstice
Hours, June 21-22 ’24
Fridays 4-6 pm Saturdays 3-5 pm
Credit: György Soponyai/Royal Museums Greenwich/Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2021
Summer Solstice 2024 is happening as we write on Thursday, June 20. This is the moment when the sun is momentarily directly above the Tropic of Cancer, the highest latitude it achieves each year, and the longest day of the year between the moment of sunrise and the moment of sunset.
Some cultures also call this Midsummer, halfway between the Spring and Fall Equinox. The dotted lines show the paths of the sun on the solstices and equinox.
This year is particularly interesting because it is the earliest solstice since 1796, when George Washington was President of the brand-new USA. For a comprehensive and quite interesting explanation of the elusive nature of measuring calendar days, check this out at Bigthink.com.
Friday Bread This Week
Multi Grain Levain – Made with a sourdough culture and using a flavorful mix of bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat and rye. A nice mixture of flax, sesame, sunflower and pumpkin seeds and some oatmeal add great flavor and crunch. And just a little honey for some sweetness. – $5/loaf
Polenta Levain – Also made with a levain, known as sourdough, in which the sourdough starter is fed and built up over several days, then mixed with bread flour and polenta in the final dough mix. This bread is a nice rustic loaf with great corn flavor. – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Gibassiers – A traditional french pastry recipe from southern France. Made with a delicious sweet dough full of milk, butter, eggs and olive oil, with orange flower water, candied orange peel and anise seed. After baking they are brushed with melted butter and sprinkled with more sugar. – 2/$5
Island Bakery has developed a rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday Janice emails the week’s bread offering to her mailing list. Orders received before 5 pm Tuesday will be available for pickup at the wine shop each Friday from 4:00 – 5:30 pm. Go to Contact us to get on the bread email list at least a week before visiting!
This week’s wine tasting
La Vielle Ferme Rosé ’22 France $11
Classic and tasty blend of grenache, syrah, and cinsault from northern Provence; fruity, dry, crisp, delicious, and smooth, all at a bargain price!
La Vielle Ferme Rouge ’22 France $11
Great drinkability, with seductive bouquet of red fruit, spices, and cherries, well balanced palate full of delicacy, freshness, and very soft tannins.
Hess Paso Robles Cabernet Sauvignon ’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.”
Economics of the Heart: Supreme Court Vs. The Constitution
davinci – generated image
It is now plain to see just how effective Leonard Leo and Republicans have been over the last several decades in transforming America from a nation of laws into an autocratic Christian State. These successes correlate closely with the loading of the Supreme Court with Catholics and far-right Protestants over the past twenty years.
These are the wonderful people who abandoned protection of everyone’s Constitutional rights for the whims of ultra-rich, ultra-self-entitled billionaires. These are the Men (and woman) in Black who brought us Citizens United (changing “one person, one vote” to “one dollar, one vote”); Hobby Lobby (legalizing prejudicial discrimination against selected subgroups of customers), and Dobbs (reversing the long-established precedent of a woman’s Right to make private choices about her own body.)
Our present situation is the result of what we might call Supreme Court gerrymandering by Leonard Leo and his forced-birth police, who seem to have taken control of every Red State government. Creepy stuff, reminiscent of Star Trek’s Borg phrase, “Resistance is Futile,” which serves to instill a sense of fear and hopelessness in their adversaries.
This self-centered unwillingness to negotiate proclaims that fighting back is not only futile but also a waste of effort and resources, and underscores the Borg’s relentless, ruthless nature and unwavering objective of assimilating all individuality into their hive collective. This is exactly the same tyrannical mindset that led Mitch McConnell to break from many decades of precedent by refusing to bring Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Senate floor after Scalia’s passing for being “too close to a election” (nearly a year), but brought Barrett’s nomination to the floor mere days before an election.
For most of our lives we elders have held the Supreme Court in high esteem, relatively faithful and conscientious arbiters of the nuances of a Constitution we all respect and to which many of us have sworn oaths to protect and defend. But now the Court has become deeply entwined with the politics of Leonard Leo, the Christian Right, and increasingly authoritarian Maga Republicans.
These issues led to an assessment by the Harvard Law Review of the need for reforms in general and two arguments for reform in particular because first, some of the Court’s recent decisions have been substantively so wrong that some intervention is needed to undo them and avert similar decisions in the future; and second, existing formal arguments for Court reform identify a set of changes, consistent with widely held political values, that would answer that need.
The arguments are heavy going for the non-lawyer, but well worth a read. They center on three perspectives for reform:
- Disempowerment: Whether or not judicial supremacy empowers the Court to undermine or entirely invalidate legislative and agency action as inconsistent with the Constitution.
- Procedural Reform: Whether the process for selecting Justices causes the Court’s decisions to be influenced by the wrong factors, such as partisan affiliation, political philosophy, or religious beliefs; and
- Political Power: Whether the growing sense of alarm about the degradation of the nomination and selection process has raised a sufficient sense of alarm and dissatisfaction about the Court’s recent actions to require reforms.
lummi island wine tasting june 14-15 ’24
Drydock Hours June 14-15
Our trusty Whatcom Chief is scheduled to be back in service this weekend, with no service for several hours while docks are re-adapted back to vehicle service.
The wine shop will remain OPEN for wine tasting and sales as usual through June:
Fridays 4-6 pm Saturdays 3-5 pm
Friday Bread This Week
Kamut Levain – Kamut, aka khorasan wheat, is an ancient grain with more protein than conventional wheat that some people find more digestible. The bread is made with a levain fermented overnight before mixing with with bread flour and fresh milled whole kamut flour. It has a nutty, rich flavor and makes a golden color. – $5/loaf
Walnut Raisin Levain – A bread I haven’t made for a long time. Has a nice mix of bread flour and freshly milled whole wheat and whole rye. The addition of raisins and toasted walnuts makes for a very flavorful bread – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Black Sesame & Candied Lemon Brioche: A delicious brioche dough full of eggs, butter and sugar. Filled with fresh lemon zest and candied lemon and as if that wasn’t enough, topped with a black sesame streusel before baking. – 2/$5
Island Bakery has developed a rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday Janice emails the week’s bread offering to her mailing list. Orders received before 5 pm Tuesday will be available for pickup at the wine shop each Friday from 4:00 – 5:30 pm. Go to Contact us to get on the bread email list at least a week before visiting!
This week’s wine tasting
Natura Rose ’21 Chile $12
Cold-soaked before pressing and cold-fermented on the skins to develop rich and nuanced aromas and flavors of grassy lime, tropical fruits, and lychee, with a crisp, lingering finish…a long-time local favorite.
Riebeek Pinotage ’21 South Africa $14
Cold soaked overnight and fermented on the lees in 80% French and 20% American oak, and blended with unoaked wine to enhance fresh fruity flavors.
Jacob Williams Syrah ’21 Washington $34
Hand-destemmed, open-top fermentation, manual punchdowns, 11 months in 12% new American oak; earthy aromas of crushed gravel and a juicy blue- fruit palate with flavors of red pepper berries and spicy finish.
Mar a Lago Update: Freedom Of Religion ≡ Freedom From Religion *
*The mathematical symbol “≡” implies that an equation is also an “identity,” where each side of the equation statement says exactly the same thing in a different way.
We bring up this point because a central element in the political consternation in which our country has been embroiled since the sixties has been the deliberate and toxic intrusion of race and religion into politics by Republicans. This began in earnest with Goldwater’s “Southern Strategy” in the sixties to woo White southern Democrats with the implicit racism of “states’ rights” and “law and order.” That resulted in a massive shift of Southern Democrats becoming very conservative Republicans. read more
In the introduction to her book White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, Anthea Butler says it is “a racism that binds and blinds many white American evangelicals to the vilification of Muslims, Latinos, and African Americans.” This is not the philosophy of Jesus. This is the philosophy of self-proclaimed autocratic white men whose aims are far more political than spiritual. And it is this single element of our political reality that drives Maga Republicans toward the Tweetster.
For ten years now his constant hateful tweets, rallies, insults, and anger-mongering has filled media world-wide with propaganda confirming all the worst paranoid fears of his gullible base. They listen, entranced and soothed by his constant lies, and donates every time he touches any of their defensive hot-spot fears about blacks, Latinos, immigrants, or Democrats. This is the show that brought the Tweetster to the White House (with a little help from election-rigging). And remember, the Washington Post documented some 25,000 lies, one by one, told to us by the Tweetster while he was playing President. The Post stopped counting, but the lies never stop.
And so we find ourselves facing another Presidential election in a few months with the Tweetster a likely candidate who happens to be awaiting sentencing after conviction in one of four criminal trials brought against him associated with his attempted coup in 2020. And as if that isn’t plenty to try to get your head around, in the meantime we have learned about major ethics breaches in our federal judicial system that have been keeping both the Tweetster and Supreme Court justices from facing legal accountability for violations of both the letter and the spirit of our Constitutional rules.
Below are some recent developments worth reading about amid all this chaos.
1. Alito interview with undercover journalist Lauren Windsor (click to open)
The story has pretty much gone viral in the last couple of days based on casual conversations a young reporter had with Alito and his wife at the Supreme Court Historical Society Annual Dinner last week. The upshot is that they took her for a sympathetic ear (not a journalist) and confided disturbing details about their prejudices. The unavoidable takeaway is that Alito is committed to enshrining his religious/philosophical views into upcoming decisions involving matters about which he has obvious conflicts of interest.
Both he and Justice Thomas have already ruled on many cases in favor of extremely wealthy men from whom they have accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in expensive gifts. This is in obvious violation of the Justice Dept. rule that justices are obligated to disclose financial gifts and to recuse themselves from any case which their participation might invoke concerns about their impartiality. Both judges have indicated they will not recuse in important upcoming cases in which they have obvious conflicts. And that is a Problem.
2. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)
Over many months now, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has dug deeply into ethics problems at the Supreme Court and made numerous videos and interviews on news programs. He has been dedicated to finding a way for Congress to get the Court follow even the modest rules already in place (such as recusing themselves from any case in which their presence might suggest even the possibility of bias. Here is a link to a very detailed and interesting interview between Sen. Whitehouse and Nicolle Wallace just yesterday on where we are and where we need to go with this issue.
3. In the same vein, here is a related interview between Chris Hayes and Reps Raskin and Occasio-Cortes on the House view of the same Supreme Court issues. The key problem, obviously, is that as long as Republicans control the House, there is unlikely to be any legislation to require Justices to act responsibly, ethically, and, well, justly. What is clear is that Democrats in both the House and the Senate are working hard to tighten ethics rules on SC Justices, because as the voting records of both Alito and Thomas imply, both have demonstrated disregard for public concerns about cronyism and outright bribery.
4. Finally, we close with this interesting piece from Politico about measuring bias of SC justices. It proposes that the current Court is made up of three groups of relatively like-minded justices who often agree with each other, depending on the cases. Their agreement or disagreement depends on two kinds of alignment, institutionalism (how much a justice considers implications beyond the facts and law of the specific case) and ideology (liberal/conservative).
One takeaway is that many decisions have been unanimous or nearly so, and generally are not controversial. The other is that the radical views of Thomas and Alito are the most toxic most of the time, and there MUST BE functional, binding, enforceable ethical standards if the Court is to reclaim the public trust and confidence.
lummi island wine tasting June 7-8 ’24
Drydock Hours June 7-8
Now three weeks into drydock routine. No trips to town last week, only one this week.Enjoying the quiet, with no trips to town this week, and none scheduled for next week. All in all, it has been pretty hassle-free, and only a few days of nasty weather. This is the latest spring drydock period we can remember. Most often DD has been two or three weeks right after Labor Day, and when in Spring generally late April-early May, which tends to be wetter and windier. The quiet this time has been restful and calming. Ahhhh
We will remain OPEN for wine tasting and sales as usual through June.
Fridays 4-6 pm Saturdays 3-5 pm
drydock passenger ferry “Salish Sea”
Friday Bread This Week
Whole Wheat Levain – Begins with a sourdouinal mixing of the dough- which is then fermented overnight in the refrigerator. This long slow process allows the fermentation process to start and the gluten to start developing. About 25% fresh milled whole wheat, a ‘toothy’ crumb, great texture and flavor and a nice crisp crust. – $5/loaf
Semolina Levain – Semolina is made from durum wheat, which is a hard wheat and often used in pasta. The flour has a lovely golden color that comes through in the bread. Uses a sourdough starter/levain that ferments overnight before mixing the final dough with bread flour, semolina and fresh milled whole wheat and little butter for a soft crumb. Makes great toast! – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Chocolate Croissants! – The traditional laminated french pastry made with sourdough and another pre-ferment to create the traditional honeycomb interior, rolled out and shaped with delicious dark chocolate in the center. – 2/$5
Island Bakery has developed a rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday Janice emails the week’s bread offering to her mailing list. Orders received before 5 pm Tuesday will be available for pickup at the wine shop each Friday from 4:00 – 5:30 pm. Go to Contact us to get on the bread email list at least a week before visiting!
This week’s wine tasting
Bodega Garzon Albarino Riserva ’22 Uruguay $18
Left on fine lees in stainless-steel tanks for 3 to 6 months, developing fruity aromas of peach and citrus, fresh minerality, marked acidity, and a long and rounded finish.
Marietta Old Vine Red ’22 California $16
Zinfandel-based red blend from Geyserville with lovely bright plum fruit, dark and focused notes of briar and black tea, a perfect balance of big flavor and vibrant sophistication, with medium body, mouth of sweet spice and velvety tannins to pair with almost any meal or occasion.
Sineann Abondante Red ’22 Washington $20
A blend of 1% cab sauv, 46% zinfandel, & 53% merlot from top vineyards in the Columbia Valley in 2022. Bright, smooth, fresh, and nuanced flavors unfold and interact softly across the palate like the ever-changing nuances of some captivating Aurora Borealis of flavor.
Mar a Lago Update: The War for Everything Heats Up
In the week since the Tweester was convicted by a New York jury, cyberspace has been exploding with right-wing lying, shouting, fist-pounding, accusations, eye-rolling, finger-pointing, and most important of all in these trying times, non-stop fund-raising. And lots of lying!
In theory the funds are wanted to help elect Republicans to Congress so they can gain full control of House, Senate, and White House. But since the RNC has now been completely taken over by the Maga puppeteers, the vast majority of funds raised by Republicans will be spent trying to get the Tweetster back in office, starting with 24/7 lying in right-wing radio, TV, and social media.
The broader move toward some version of corporate-controlled autocracy has been under construction since the New Deal nearly 100 years ago. But the groundwork for where we are now began with the Heritage Foundation and other right wing think tanks beginning in the 70’s. Little by little the rights, freedoms, opportunities, and voices of individual people have been eclipsed by the burgeoning corporate state by linking political control at the highest levels of government with the corporate control of finance and production and the systematic global failure to make the global economy environmentally responsible.
Republicans have successfully changed the rules across the country enough to win the White House three times without winning the popular vote. And for the 2016 election, in the Tweetster they found their perfect candidate: a man with no allegiance to anyone or anything, an insatiable need to be constantly in the public eye, headlining in every day’s news across the entire planet with his latest rants, boasts, insults, and outrages, a man with no ethics, no scruples, no conscience: perfect for their needs.
It is of considerable comfort to have had the Tweetster found guilty of felony-level crimes. But news for the past week has seen a constant barrage of right-wing claims the trial was rigged by Democrats despite the Tweetster’s army of lawyers and high-placed judges successfully postponing his pending trials. (Sometime this month the Supremes will probably agree he is immune for prosecution on some newly hatched technical point) Numerous participants in the 2021 coup efforts are in jail, and more still face trials. But the process has been agonizingly slow.
The very recent vote in the Senate forced Republican Senators to say publicly if they endorsed pending state laws making both physical and drug-induced abortion illegal and also making contraception itself imprisonable. These laws are strongly opposed by considerable majorities of women voters and will hopefully be a boon to Democratic candidates in Red states in November.
Bottom line for today: lots of reasons to be pessimistic, but lots of possibilities for guarded optimism, too.
This must be something like the feeling ordinary citizens had in Germany when Hitler was rising.
In trying times like this, one thing is for sure: tasting some great wines with friends and neighbors will take some of the edge off. Join us for wine tasting this weekend!
lummi island wine tasting may 31- jun 1 ’24
Drydock Hours May 31-June 1
Now almost halfway through drydock and passenger-only ferry, and enjoying the quiet, with no trips to town this week. Ahhhh…
We will remain OPEN for wine tasting and sales as usual through drydock.
Fridays 4-6 pm Saturdays 3-5 pm
drydock passenger ferry “Salish Sea”
This week’s wine tasting
Domaine Chibaou Sauvignon Blanc ’22 France $19
no notes available
Can Blau Can Blau ’20 Spain $16
From the lovely Montsant wine region an hour SW of Barcelona, this long-time favorite calms the soul with a romas and flavors of cocoa bean, ripe dark fruits and berries, a seamless texture, and long, silky finish that improves with aeration.
Jacob Williams Barbera ’22 Washington $34
Medium body; juicy red fruit up front opens to a savory and herbal midpalate and earthy finish. Enjoyable now, but sure to evolve into an even more comforting sipper as it matures.
Friday Bread This Week (reminder: bread pickup is Saturday this week!)
Heidebrot – Translated as “bread of the heath,” after a region in central Germany known for fields of red heather. This is a farmhouse bread from an aromatic, lighter sourdough made with whole grain rye. a rye-fed sourdough starter, fresh milled whole grain rye flour, and regular bread flour as well – $5/loaf
Sweet Corn & Dried Cranberry– Made with polenta and bread flour, then enriched with milk, butter and honey for a soft and tender crumb and loaded up with dried cranberries for great corn flavor… A delicious bread that makes great toast!– $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Muffins! – FOUR to an order for $5, with two flavors of two different muffins, i.e. four muffins per order! Each order comes with TWO Almond Poppy Seed and TWO Chocolate Chip muffins.
Island Bakery has developed a rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday Janice emails the week’s bread offering to her mailing list. Orders received before 5 pm Tuesday will be available for pickup at the wine shop each Friday from 4:00 – 5:30 pm. Go to Contact us to get on the bread email list.
Mar a Lago Update: Tweetster at the Crossroads
Until about 2 pm today, given all the accountability that the Tweetster has NOT had to face for as long as anyone can remember, we feared the odds of his ever being held accountable for anything in any court anywhere were close to zero.
So we are deeply relieved to have been wrong about that, as the jury in the NY election interference just delivered a “guilty on all counts” verdict. This is a welcome and important victory for our Constitution and the America we grew up in. Still… it so surprising it will take a long time to sink in!
We hope it means that, as the ancient haiku claims, “To judge the direction of the wind, it is enough to see a single blade of grass…”
This likely throws at least a small wrench into the well-underway, highly organized, and extremely well-funded Fascist takeover of our country, as outlined in great detail in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. They are now out in the open about their efforts to re-install the Tweetster in the Oval Office as their wholly-owned PINO (‘President in Name Only’), to be their wholly controlled Dictator Puppet who distracts on stage while they eliminate all those cushy civil service jobs, social security, environmental protection…the list goes on and on and on. These are the capitalists Marx predicted would take all the profits from production and keep workers at bare subsistence living while they reserved wealth for their elite few.
So let’s keep in mind that this little victory is a troublesome inconvenience for Heritage and its Fascist enablers. After all, they have a lot invested in creating Maga for their own purposes, and changing candidates at this late date will now be an electoral challenge as well as a financial inconvenience. You can bet they have an array of backup plans, and recent history demonstrates clearly that there is no shortage of wannabe dictators in today’s GOP ranks who will say and do Anything to gain power. Curiously, none of them has the Tweetster’s complete lack of empathy for anyone or anything that drives the Maga Faithful to his service.
In any case, today’s events provide a long-overdue opportunity for us all to exhale for a few breaths between rounds. Please stop by this weekend to celebrate this collective victory for our Constitution and the society it has made possible for nearly 250 years.
2072 Granger Way