“As the size of the Fed’s balance sheet ballooned,” continues Mr. Pento, “the dollar amount of capital held at the Fed has remained fairly constant. Today, the Fed has $52.5 billion of capital backing a $2.7 trillion balance sheet.
“Prior to the bursting of the credit bubble, the public was shocked to learn that our biggest investment banks were levered 30-to-1. When asset values fell, those banks were quickly wiped out. But now the Fed is holding many of the same types of assets and is levered 51-to-1! If the value of their portfolio were to fall by just 2%, the Fed itself would be wiped out.”
The World Is Being Run By Crazy People
A Toronto elementary school has banned most balls from its playground, citing the need to protect staff and students after a parent got hit in the head with a soccer ball.
Related: Free range kids.
h/t Dan T.
Reader Tips
This week’s municipal theme song: Move Along You Lazy Cattle.
Herd your Reader Tips into the comments.
Hashtag of the Entitlement Generation
Trying so, so hard to find historic importance in their utterly useless lives:
For those not familiar with what Rosa Parks did, please watch this.
Michael Moore: America’s Big, Fat Hypocrite
Devout Leftists tend to be hypocrites but Michael Moore really takes the cake. Charles Adler shares his thoughts.
Cornell’s Greatest Moment
By a 26-1 vote the Student Assembly of Cornell University in upstate New York passed a resolution earlier this month calling for the conversion of every single-stall bathroom on campus to a gender-neutral facility and prescribing the inclusion of gender-neutral bathrooms in all future University buildings. Why? So as to deal with transgender issues.
Open Question: What do you think their next bathroom related resolution will entail?
Natasha Lennard: America’s Kai Nagata
Remember Kai Nagata? It appears that America has discovered its very own Journo-Activist in the persona of one Natasha Lennard. Like Nagata, she wrote her own version of “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina”.
Not everyone is so quick to let her off the hook though. Are J-Schools actually able to churn out unbiased journalists anymore or is every graduate predestined to be a far left “social activist”?!
Here’s Lennard helping organize a group of fellow comrades:
If ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Was a Baseball Game
“As the money dwindles…”
“No taxation without representation”. The cry is familiar, except in this case it is s the Redcoats that are saying it as Germany sends the taxman to collect money from Britain to bail out the EU.
Employment Opportunity for the Occupy Protesters
Many of the Urban Camping Aficionados have stated over & over again that there’s no work for them. Well, one division of the U.S. Government has just posted a new job ad that might very well be perfect for them.
There are a few restrictions though:
- Height between 5’2″ and 6’3″
- 20/20 vision or correctable to the same
- Blood pressure not to exceed 140/90 measured in a sitting position
- Regular drug-testing will be required
While the last item may knock out of contention many of the Occupy crowd, surely there must be some who would pass. Interested Occupy participants and/or SDA trolls can check out a few other requirements here.
CBC: Focus On The Farmers!
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Canadian Wheat Board protest, CBC lens…
Canadian Wheat Board protest, wide angle lens…
(h/t Rolf)
Forget the Ombudsman. Here’s a list of CBC addresses, for those who want to indulge in a little mockery.
This Is Awkward
The BBC has owned up to a “nominal fee” programming scandal in which viewers of 15 editorial programmes were hoodwinked by “serious” conflicts of interest of programme makers and a failure to declare that documentaries had outside sponsors.
[…]
An audit of BBC World programmes uncovered a series of current affairs programmes that – in breach of guidelines – had been funded by corporate sponsorship, which was often not declared.
One of the programmes in breach of guidelines was “Taking the Credit” made by for BBC World on the subject of Africa and climate change by the award-winning British production company Rockhopper television. The Trust found that the programme had effectively been sponsored by the Envirotrade organisation, despite the fact that current affairs programmes are prohibited from using sponsorship. Envirotrade was featured in a positive light in the programme but “viewers were unaware that there was a funding arrangement in place,” said the Trust report.
h/t Robert of Ottawa
Reader Tips
Sometimes, if you’re in the right place at the right time, magnificent spectacles of nature unfold before your eyes and take your breath away: here’s Sophie Windsor Clive’s Murmuration.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
The Children Are Our Future
And that’s why the family compound is patrolled by hyenas..
Hashtag Of The Entitlement Generation
Live coverage at the recently evicted Zuccottibots on Loservision now.
Hashtag Of The Entitlement Generation
Occupy Wall Street is just like the Tea Party, except for:
Potential Cancer Vaccine?
A tiny nation in the middle of an intellectual wasteland has yet another scientific breakthrough;
In a breakthrough development, the Israeli company Vaxil BioTherapeutics has formulated a therapeutic cancer vaccine, now in clinical trials at Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem. If all goes well, the vaccine could be available about six years down the road, to administer on a regular basis not only to help treat cancer but in order to keep the disease from recurring.
The vaccine is being tested against a type of blood cancer called multiple myeloma. If the substance works as hoped — and it looks like all arrows are pointing that way — its platform technology VaxHit could be applied to 90 percent of all known cancers, including prostate and breast cancer, solid and non-solid tumors.
Some countries have all the luck.
This Is Not Your Grandma’s Humane Society
Climategate: The Mann Emails
Currently public emails show Mann was unable to provide even his close colleagues data he used in some of his papers and could not remember which data sets he used. A query to UVA shows the university, who owns “the data and notebooks resulting from sponsored research,” had no copy of Mann’s logbooks and never gave him permission to take them with him when he left UVA. The university refused to inquire within Mann’s department as to whether anyone there knew whether he even kept a research logbook, so it’s impossible for me to know whether he stole the logbook or just never prepared one in the first place.
Emphasis mine.
h/t Maz2
Ezra Visits The CBC
The full pdf here. (3 megs). Enjoy!