Moral bankruptcy and the impeachment process

I am just wondering about how the Republican Senators are explaining their actions to their children (or, given the age of most of them, their grandchilden).
I don't for a moment think that most of them believe that Donald Trump is an innocent man, but they are willing to support him because the alternative - the impeachment of a Republican president, and potential years in the political wilderness for the Republican party - they see as unthinkable. Even those who hate the guy will not vote to impeach him, and precious few will even vote to allow the semblance of a fair trial, with witnesses and all the other trappings of a normal court case. If their grandkids, then, ask them why they would do that, what do they say? Do they just take a deep breath and say that the success of the party is more important than the truth?
Consider something else: how does Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz explain to his grandkids the morality of his argument that a president can do pretty much anything to get re-elected so long as he believes that his re-election is in the public interest of the country. This is such a shocking statement that even small children will see how wrong it is, and what a precedent it would set for the future. Dershowitz too must be aware of how wrong, and how dangerous, it is. What, then, does he say to said grandchildren if the subject comes up at the dinner table? That the law is all about winning at any cost, and that morality just doesn't come into it? Or does the whole family just know not to bring the subject up.
It's a pretty sad state of affairs, and you have to feel for the moral agonizing these people have to deal with. Ha!

Christine Sinclair's achievement in perspective

Shout out to Christine Sinclair, Canada's soccer superstar, as she breaks the record for all time international goal-scoring.
Notching up goals 184 and 185 the other day in a 11-0 rout of St. Kitts & Nevis, she beat out American Abby Wambach to become, not only the highest scoring woman in international soccer, but the highest scoring person. Period.
For perspective, the highest scoring male is still Ali Daei of Iran (who? you say) with a paltry 104. For even more perspective, Ms. Sinclair has scored more international goals than Pele (77) and Cristiano Ronaldo (99) combined!

Donald Trump's wall is falling down

Trump's wall: winds blow over sections of US-Mexico border fence.
Brilliant! Just brilliant!

A pair of criminals propose a "peace plan" for Palestine

It makes quite a picture: two old white guys in black suits blithely shrugging off serious threats to their credibility and integrity, and making totally impractical and already discredited plans for the fate of a whole country, thereby throwimg the entire region into yet more instability and violent turmoil.
Looking through that sentence, I could probably have been referring to any number of personages throughout history. But, as it happens, I am referring to Benjamin Neyanyahu and Donald Trump - one newly indicted on corruption charges and one in the middle of an impeachment trial - as they propose a "peace plan", which just happens to be exactly what Israel has been calling for for decades, and which takes into account the Palestinian viewpoint not a whit.
Should these characters even be out in public, never mind be making pronouncements that affect the lives of millions of people?

What to drink instead of milk

I know I should be drinking less milk, and I do drink less than I used to (not so with cheese however). For one thing, a glass of cow's milk produces about three times more greenhouse gases than any plant-based milk. But I have found it a hard habit to kick, despite strong provocation from my daughter.
But it seems like most milk substitutes have their own problems. So, what's a well-meaning, right-on guy to do? Let's look at the alternatives (thank you, Guardian):

• Almond milk: uses less farmland than most alternatives, but a lot more water (130 pints of water to produce a single glass of almond milk!). Almond trees also require pollination by bees, and almost 70% of California's commercial bee population are pressed this service every year, stressing them out and apparently killing a good percentage.
• Coconut milk: poor and underpaid pickers from Indonesia, Philippines and India are exploited for coconut production, and rainforests in Indonesia are being clear-cut at a rate of three acres every minute to make way for coconut plantations.
• Rice milk: less nutritious than other alternatives and a real water hog, rice milk also produces more greenhouse gas emissions than other plant-based alternatives, mainly due to methane produced by bacteria breeding in the rice paddies.
• Hazelnut milk: a reasonably good and tasty alternative, although not as easily available as many others, hazelnuts do not require bees for pollination like almonds do.
• Hemp and flax milk: milk alternatives produced from seeds are not as widely available as nut milks, and their relatively small production means less monoculture farming.
• Soy milk: the only plant milk that comes close to the protein content of dairy, soy was the first plant-based milk alternative to be commercially available, and it remains one of the best. Concerns about human-type hormones in soya are overblown (it would require a huge intake of soy milk to create any hormonal problems, and recent studies give it a clean bill of health). The main drawback of soya is that it is used so ubiquitously for animal feed that vast swaths of rainforest in the Amazon and elsewhere have been razed to make way for soya production, so the sourcing of soy milk becomes important.
• Oat milk: rapidly becoming more popular, oat milk is perhaps the best plant-based milk alternative available. Oats are grown in cooler climates and so avoid the problem of tropical deforestation, although they are grown in vast monocultures (again largely for animal feed), and are often produced using the carcinogenic Roundup pesticide, which has even been found in a third of products made from supposedly organic oats!

The bottom line: anything is better than dairy milk but, of the alternatives, soy and oat milks are the best.

A map of non-English non-Spanish languages spoken in the USA

Somebody has done some grunt work and produced a map of the USA that shows the most commonly used language in each state other than English and Spanish. The results make for some interesting, not to say bewildering, reading, and are a testament, I suppose, to the lesser known immigration history of the United States.

For example, the cluster of Vietnamese speakers in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, the cluster of Philippino (Tagalog) speakers in California and Nevada, and the cluster of Koreans in Alabama and Georgia. Then there are two clusters of German speakers, a mid-West one comprising Ohio, Indian and Kentucky, and another in the Rockies, in Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana and North Dakota. The Portuguese clearly settled in the New England states of Massachussetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, but it's news to me. Chinese states, on the other hand, seem to be spread pretty much at random across the country.

French makes sense in the New England states bordering Quebec, and in ex-French colony Louisiana, but North Carolina? Likewise, Haitian Creole perhaps belongs in Florida, but Delaware? There are a surprising number of states with a plurality of Arabic speakers (despite Donald Trump's best efforts), including West Virginia, Tennessee and Michigan, none of which I think of as particularly progressive states. And then there are the outliers: Nepalis in Nebraska, Somali in Minnesota, Hmong in Wisconsin, Gujarati (not Italian!) in New Jersey. Inexplicable!

And finally, it's interesting to see that some native languages remain strong: Navajo in New Mexico and Arizona, Dakota/Lakota/Nakita/Sioux in South Dakota, Aleut-Eskimo in Alaska, Ilocana in Hawaii.

Kobe Bryant was no angel, whatever the eulogies might suggest

The eulogies are flooding in for Kobe Bryant, dead after a helicopter crash the other day. In fact, the eulogies are flooding in from people who used to hate the guy back in his playing days. Which is just the way it goes, I understand - you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead.
But from what I can glean, and contrary to the eulogies, he was not a very pleasant guy at all. Here's a less-than-flattering article by a Lakers fan from 2010, during Bryant's heyday, and here's one of the very few eulogies-tempered-with-realism I could find.
Clearly, Bryant was a good basketball player, that much is not in dispute. But apparently he had few friends, and made plenty of enemies both within basketball and within the press corps and fan base with his snide and destructive comments about others. He was undeniably a ball- (and glory-) hog and a thoroughgoing individualist in a team sport. And then there was the whole rape allegation thing, not ultimately proven in court as the victim chose not to testify, but pretty damning from what evidence did come out.
And who takes a helicopter to a basketball game anyway? Apparently, he would take a helicopter to games and even practices, which seems just bizarre to me The fact that his helicopter was flying on a foggy day when most other helicopters (including police helicopters) chose not to is still being investigated, and more details may yet surface. The press has been widely reporting that Bryant's 13-year old daughter was also killed, but let's not forget that so were 7 others.
Anyway, I'm not here to speak ill of the dead either. It's just interesting how people's tones change after someone died. The same thing happened with Toronto ex-mayor Rob Ford, villified and widely disliked during his life, but raised almost to sainthood after his death. I guess that's just the way it goes with polarizing individuals.

Canadian craft breweries - too much, too fast

If you're having trouble keeping track of all the new microbreweries in your city, you're not alone. There was a time when a new craft brewery was a big event; nowadays, it's hard to even try out the new ones before they disappear. There are four or five craft breweries within a few kilometres of our house that have sprung up in the last couple of years alone, and we still haven't got around to visiting them. Occasionally, we will try out new names while in a bar or restsurant, but it's easy to lose track of who's who and who's good, what with all those wacky names and hyperbolic descriptions.
So, it probably doesn't come as too much of a surprise to read in the Globe and Mail that, over the last decade, the number of breweries in Canada has burgeoned from a little over 200 to nearly 1,000, the majority of that increase occurring between 2013 and 2017.
Neither does it surprise me greatly that funding for new breweries, which at one time was an easy sell, is much harder to come by these days, as investors see a market which is starting to look over-saturated. We are starting to see breweries closing down or being put up for sale (often with the Labatts and Molsons of the world snapping up some of their smaller competitors). According to Statistics Canada, only about 50% of Canadian breweries were actually profitable in 2017, with most of the others being labours of love. It can take 5 to 7 years for a craft brewery to generate cash flow, and many just don't make it that far.
It almost makes me want to go out right now and visit a couple of my local watering holes. But then I look out and see it is raining, and put it off for another day.