The weekend begins yet again and we need a diversion from horrific news of the day…..that is where I come in…….

Some disturbing news that was not widely reports….it appears the US Navy has a bit of a problem on their hands.

The number of sailors who deserted the Navy last year is more than double the number who deserted in 2019, a statistic that one expert described as “staggering.” 

According to a new report from NBC, 157 sailors deserted the Navy last year, compared to 98 in 2020, and 63 in 2019. While Navy officials couldn’t explain the increase to NBC, they pointed to the “many different stressors” in the service. And there have been many stressors made public in the last several months. 

The service started the year amid a water contamination crisis in Hawaii that displaced thousands of service members and their families from their homes. In February, junior soldiers and sailors told Navy Times they were living without “basic qualities of life” at the Naval Support Activity Bethesda barracks, which houses the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Navy Times described barracks that went without air conditioning for several months in the summer, had no hot water, and even had doors that wouldn’t lock. And at Naval Air Station Key West, Florida, junior sailors are on their own to find housing after the Navy recently announced it was shutting down a barracks for repairs. 

Sailors are deserting the Navy at a ‘staggering’ rate

Palm oil a saga in greed….

Palm oil is in half of all packaged supermarket products, not only in foods but also cosmetics. The stout palm oil tree has always been an important food source in its native West Africa, but its use in global consumer products has exploded in the past few decades. Today, Indonesia and Malaysia are the largest producers, but Guatemala is the biggest source in Central America. Like other palm economies, it “is plagued by problems borne from and enabled by the world’s appetite for cheap vegetable fat,” according to a report in the Bafflerby Alessandra Bergamin, who found evidence of greed, corruption, ecocide, and murder in the Petén region, which accounts for a third of Guatemala’s land area.

First, company reps arrive promising big economic opportunity, but it’s nothing more than a land grab. Those who resist are threatened and soon find their lands encircled. Aside from stripping the land of biodiversity, palm plantations require oxidation ponds to collect insecticides and palm effluent. The latter is organic waste that is “one hundred times more polluting than domestic sewage” if left untreated. In Petén, a pond overflow poisoned the Pasión River in 2015, killing thousands of fish. Attempts at legal redress were met with a spate of kidnappings, a murder by masked gunmen, and a return to business as usual. The Geneva-based Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil provides “Certified Sustainable Palm Oil” tags to producers who meet certain social and environmental standards, but Bergamin’s reporting suggests community complaints are ignored in the process.

Read the full story.

Did you ever see the film Independence Day?

There could be some truth to the premise…..

The Milky Way is home to millions of potentially habitable planets — and approximately four of them may harbor evil alien civilizations that would invade Earth if they could, new research posted to the preprint database arXiv (opens in new tab) suggests.

The new paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, poses a peculiar question: What are the odds that humans could one day contact a hostile alien civilization that’s capable of invading our planet?

To answer this, sole study author Alberto Caballero — a doctoral student in conflict resolution at the University of Vigo in Spain — began by looking back at human history before looking out to the stars.

“This paper attempts to provide an estimation of the prevalence of hostile extraterrestrial civilizations through an extrapolation of the probability that we, as the human civilization, would attack or invade an inhabited exoplanet,” Caballero wrote in the study.

https://www.space.com/malicious-alien-civilizations-odds

That should be enough to keep your mind busy for awhile…..

Have a great day.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”