Monday News Snips

I’m completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death. George Carlin

A living wage? Entry level jobs at most retailers were never meant to provide a “living wage”. Nobody graduates school and says “I want to be a Starbucks barista”. In addition those raises in wage costs will be passed onto consumers.

For all you knuckleheads on Fox who say that Biden can’t put two sentences together, here’s a news flash: He just put NATO together, Europe together and the whole Western alliance together — stretching from Canada up to Finland and all the way to Japan — to help Ukraine protect its fledgling democracy from Vladimir Putin’s fascist regime

Joe Biden has pledged to use the US military to defend Taiwan if China were to invade in remarks made during his first visit to Japan as US president. “Yes. That is the commitment we made,” Biden said at a joint news conference in Tokyo on Monday when asked whether he was willing to use force to defend Taiwan. Right now China has a lot of economic issues and is dealing with another wave of Covid.

As climbing gas prices force Americans to change their spending habits, one thing Americans aren’t doing is driving significantly less. All that driving in this moment of low fuel supply is pushing prices up further. “As we reopen, there is a lot of pent-up demand,” Tran said. “People are willing to pay higher prices to make up for lost travel over the last few years.”

Neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins have identified a mechanism in the brain behind age-related memory loss. The system lies in the hippocampus, the memory control center of the brain, and its discovery sheds fresh light on the causes of dementia and could combat Alzheimer’s and other age-related neurological disorders. “With many memory disorders, something is going wrong with this area,” says the senior author, professor James Knierim of the university in Baltimore.