Saturday Miscellany

First, damn those capitalists. Major banks and investment houses have reduced their investments in climate change initiatives. They have chosen to walk away from the United Nations’ climate alliance. They are giving up on the war against the weather. Uh, oh.

The New York Post has the story. It concerns the nation’s largest bank, JP Morgan Chase and its largest asset manager, BlackRock:

JPMorgan Chase and institutional investors BlackRock and State Street Global Advisors announced Thursday that they are quitting or, in the case of BlackRock, substantially scaling back involvement in a massive United Nations climate alliance formed to combat global warming through corporate sustainability agreements.

In a statement, the New York-based Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan explained that it would exit the so-called Climate Action 100+ investor group because of the expansion of its in-house sustainability team and the establishment of its climate risk framework in recent years.

Larry Fink’s BlackRock and State Street, which both manage trillions of dollars in assets, said the alliance’s climate initiatives had gone too far, expressing concern about potential legal issues as well.

The stunning announcements come as the largest financial institutions in the US and worldwide face an onslaught of pressure from consumer advocates and Republican states over their environmental, social and governance (ESG) priorities.

It looks like ESG investing was a fad whose time has come and gone. 

Second, if only he had known. The Hamas Number 2 leader has expressed surprise at the Israeli counterattack that followed the October 7 massacre. 

Now, the Israeli offensive has reduced most of Gaza to rubble and has shown Yahya Sinwar that he messed with the wrong enemy.

The Daily Mail reports:

Hamas' second-in-command is said to regret the October 7 massacre as he didn't expect Israel's retaliation to be 'so dangerous'. 

Yahya Sinwar, who is believed to have orchestrated last year's terrorist attack wouldn't have done so if he knew what the consequences would be according to his friend, Esmat Mansour.

Mansour told Sky News that his terrorist friend's plan was miscalculated and gave Israel an excuse to unleash hellfire.

Mansour said: 'He didn't expect the operation to make things this complicated and to go as far as it did and become this dangerous and (it) gave Israel all the reasons and excuses to break all the rules.'

Alledgedly, Sinwar's plan was to use the massacre to aid the release of his friend from prison and turn him into another Hamas leader as well as lifting the 'Israeli siege' on the area.

The way to drive some sense into Hamas is to make their terrorist tactics too expensive. Fortunately, the Israelis have gotten the message, even if the Biden administration has not.

Third, I have suspected this for some time. Now we have evidence. If you want to enhance brain connectivity-- who doesn’t?-- you should write by hand, not on a keyboard.

A recent study from Norway found that the old-school art of handwriting engages parts of the brain that tapping on a keyboard does not. The intricate movements involved in handwriting activate more regions of the brain associated with learning than typing does.

A new study published in Frontiers in Psychology and led by Audrey van der Meer, a neuroscience researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, examined the differences between handwriting and typing. Ms. Van der Meer and her team analyzed the neural networks involved in both activities to uncover their respective impacts on brain connectivity.

“We show that when writing by hand, brain connectivity patterns are far more elaborate than when typewriting on a keyboard,” she said in a press statement. “Such widespread brain connectivity is known to be crucial for memory formation and for encoding new information and, therefore, is beneficial for learning.”

Fourth, here is some bad news from the world of plastics. These miracle substances cannot be recycled. This means, plastics are forever. You suspected as much. Now, The Hill has the report:

Plastics producers have promoted recycling their products as an environmental solution for decades despite firsthand knowledge that it was not feasible, according to a report published Thursday.

More than 99 percent of plastics are produced using fossil fuels, and of these, the vast majority cannot be “recycled” in the sense of being processed and turned into entirely new products, according to the report from the Center for Climate Integrity. Viable end markets, or businesses that buy recyclables to make new products, only exist for polyethylene terephthalate and high-density polyethylene plastic containers, according to the report. Environmental Protection Agency materials have documented this for at least 30 years. 

Fifth, what could possibly go wrong? Naturally, we are fully engaged in our Cold War against China. And yet, strangely enough, we are still collaborating with Chinese laboratories in research on special kinds of bird viruses-- like Covid.

The Daily Mail reports:

The US government is spending $1million of American taxpayer money to fund gain-of-function experiments on dangerous bird flu viruses in collaboration with Chinese scientists.

The research involves infecting ducks and geese with different strains to make them more transmissible and infectious, and study the viruses' potential to 'jump into mammalian hosts,' according to the research documents.

It is being funded through the US Department of Agriculture and will take place at sites in Georgia, Beijing and Edinburgh in Scotland.

Have we learned anything yet?

Sixth, Stanford University has decided to combat anti-Semitism. Aaron Sibarium reports on what happened when it sponsored a discussion about the problem.

January 24, Stanford University held a forum on combating anti-Semitism. The event, which featured Stanford president Richard Saller and provost Jenny Martinez, was meant to reassure Jewish students that the university had their back amid the wave of anti-Semitism sweeping college campuses.

"We really do want to make sure that all of the communities on campus get the respect that they deserve," Saller told the forum. "We’re committed to equal treatment and equal protection."

The events that transpired that night undercut that message. By the end of the evening, protesters had physically threatened Jewish students, harassed a rabbi, and told employees of the elite university that they would "find out where you live."

David Schuller, 24, a yarmulke-wearing graduate student in Stanford’s physics department, found himself surrounded by a mob of hecklers when he approached a protest outside the forum.

Seventh, in an Atlanta courtroom, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis may or may not have been wearing her dress backwards. Some of you will know more about this than I do, but still, when the zipper looks like it is in the front of the dress that suggests that you have put it on backwards.

As for the Willis performance, leave it to Glenn Greenwald to sum it up:

How someone reacts to the Fani Willis testimony yesterday is a litmus test for if they're a complete partisan hack. Anyone who denies that she clearly lied, could not respond to basic questions, acted inappropriately, and corrupted this prosecution is a mindless Dem partisan.

For the record, Greenwald is anything but a Trump supporter. Heck, he is not even a right wing conservative.

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