Showing posts with label soft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label soft. Show all posts

Thursday, March 13, 2014

MIT Creates Soft Robotic Fish, Moves Like the Real Thing

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MIT Creates Soft Robotic Fish, Moves Like the Real Thing

MIT Creates Soft Robotic Fish, Moves Like the Real Thing

At A Political Statement, the privacy of our visitors is of extreme importance to us (See this article to learn more about Privacy Policies.). This privacy policy document outlines the types of personal information is received and collected by A Political Statement and how it is used.

Log Files

Like many other Web sites, A Political Statement makes use of log files. The information inside the log files includes internet protocol (IP) addresses, type of browser, Internet Service Provider (ISP), date/time stamp, referring/exit pages, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user"s movement around the site, and gather demographic information. IP addresses, and other such information are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable.

Cookies and Web Beacons

A Political Statement does use cookies to store information about visitors preferences, record user-specific information on which pages the user access or visit, customize Web page content based on visitors browser type or other information that the visitor sends via their browser.

DoubleClick DART Cookie

  • Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on A Political Statement.
  • Google"s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to users based on their visit to A Political Statement and other sites on the Internet.
  • Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy at the following URL - http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html.

These third-party ad servers or ad networks use technology to the advertisements and links that appear on A Political Statement send directly to your browsers. They automatically receive your IP address when this occurs. Other technologies ( such as cookies, JavaScript, or Web Beacons ) may also be used by the third-party ad networks to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and / or to personalize the advertising content that you see.

A Political Statement has no access to or control over these cookies that are used by third-party advertisers.

You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices. A Political Statement"s privacy policy does not apply to, and we cannot control the activities of, such other advertisers or web sites.

If you wish to disable cookies, you may do so through your individual browser options. More detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers can be found at the browser"s respective websites.


MIT Creates Soft Robotic Fish, Moves Like the Real Thing

Friday, March 7, 2014

Massive Dinosaur Soft Tissue Discovery In China – Includes Skin And Feathers!



Tyrannosaurus rex skull - Photo by EncycloPetey


A fossil bed in China that is being called “Jurassic Park” has yielded perhaps the greatest dinosaur soft tissue discovery of all time.  According to media reports, “nearly-complete skeletons” have been discovered that even include skin and feathers.  But of course if these dinosaurs are really “160 million years old”, that should be absolutely impossible.  Needless to say, this shocking discovery is once again going to have paleontologists scrambling to find a way to prop up the popular myths that they have been promoting.  What they have been telling us simply does not fit the facts.  The truth is that this latest find is even more evidence that dinosaurs are far, far younger than we have traditionally been taught.


Once upon a time, scientists believed that it would be impossible to find anything other than the hardened fossilized remains of extinct dinosaurs.  And if those dinosaurs really were millions of years old, those scientists would have been 100% correct.  But instead, we are now starting to find dinosaur soft tissue all over the place.  The following is an excerpt from a recent Daily Mail article about this new discovery in China…


Almost more impressive than the diversity of the biota is the preservation of many of the vertebrate specimens, according to the study published in the Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology.


Fossils include complete or nearly-complete skeletons associated with preserved soft tissues such as feathers, fur, skin or even, in some of the salamanders, external gills.


One is the feathered dinosaur Epidexipteryx whose soft tissues have been revealed by the use of ultraviolet light scanners.


A fossil of the salamander Chunerpeton shows not only the preserved skeleton but also its skin and external gills.



Wow.


Hopefully scientists in the west will get a chance to closely examine these soft tissue samples.


Prior to 1991, you would have been laughed out of the room if you had suggested that we might dig up the soft tissue of dinosaurs someday.


But all of that changed when Mary Schweitzer, a molecular paleontologist at North Carolina State University, did something that was absolutely unthinkable.  The following comes from an article in Smithsonian Magazine


In 1991, Schweitzer was trying to study thin slices of bones from a 65-million-year-old T. rex. She was having a hard time getting the slices to stick to a glass slide, so she sought help from a molecular biologist at the university. The biologist, Gayle Callis, happened to take the slides to a veterinary conference, where she set up the ancient samples for others to look at. One of the vets went up to Callis and said, “Do you know you have red blood cells in that bone?” Sure enough, under a microscope, it appeared that the bone was filled with red disks. Later, Schweitzer recalls, “I looked at this and I looked at this and I thought, this can’t be. Red blood cells don’t preserve.”


Schweitzer showed the slide to Horner. “When she first found the red-blood-cell-looking structures, I said, Yep, that’s what they look like,” her mentor recalls. He thought it was possible they were red blood cells, but he gave her some advice: “Now see if you can find some evidence to show that that’s not what they are.”


What she found instead was evidence of heme in the bones—additional support for the idea that they were red blood cells. Heme is a part of hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in the blood and gives red blood cells their color. “It got me real curious as to exceptional preservation,” she says.



Posted below is an excerpt from a 60 Minutes video report about her remarkable discovery…



Of course since that time, many others have also dug up dinosaur soft tissue.  At this point, more than thirty specimens have been discovered and tested, and the specimens have come from an impressive array of various dinosaurs


The dinosaurs and other Mesozoic creatures that have yielded their biological material are hadrosaur, titanosaur, ornithomimosaur [ostrich-like dinosaurs], mosasaur, triceratops, Lufengosaurs, T. rex, and Archaeopteryx.



When Schweitzer originally made her discovery public, she was viciously attacked by other evolutionists who insisted that finding dinosaur soft tissue that was millions of years old was absolutely impossible.


And those evolutionists were right.


If the dinosaurs were really that old it would be impossible.


But now sample after sample and test after test have proven without a shadow of a doubt that we really are digging up dinosaur soft tissue.


Schweitzer and other paleontologists that are desperate to prop up their existing theories are now suggesting that “iron in the blood” could have preserved the soft tissue that we are finding for all of these millions of years.


If you believe that laughable theory, I have a bridge to sell you.


But there are a lot of people out there that are so desperate to keep believing their flawed version of “the truth” that they are actually buying it.


If you are interested in more of the technical details of this theory, you can find a more detailed explanation right here.


And of course it is not just soft tissue that scientists have to account for


It is not just dinosaur soft tissue, either, but the presence of detectable proteins such as collagen, hemoglobin, osteocalcin, actin, and tubulin that they must account for. These are complex molecules that continually tend to break down to simpler ones.


Not only that, but in many cases, there are fine details of the bone matrix, with microscopically intact-looking bone cells (osteocytes) showing incredible detail. And Schweitzer has even recovered fragments of the even more fragile and complex molecule, DNA. This has been extracted from the bone cells with markers indicating its source such that it is extremely likely to be dinosaur DNA.



In this case, I think that it would be very appropriate to apply Occam’s razor.  The reason why we are finding dinosaur bones with soft tissue in them is because they simply are not very old.


And when we carbon date dinosaur bones, it tells us the exact same thing.


Due to the rate that it decays, there should be absolutely no measurable radioactive carbon left in anything that was once living that is greater than 100,000 years old.


So there should be absolutely no measurable radioactive carbon in dinosaur bones.


But instead, that is precisely what we find.  Here is one example


“In June of 1990, Hugh Miller submitted two dinosaur bone fragments to the Department of Geosciences at the University in Tucson, Arizona for carbon-14 analysis. One fragment was from an unidentified dinosaur. The other was from an Allosaurus excavated by James Hall near Grand Junction, Colorado in 1989. Miller submitted the samples without disclosing the identity of the bones. (Had the scientists known the samples actually were from dinosaurs, they would not have bothered dating them, since it is assumed dinosaurs lived millions of years ago—outside the limits of radiocarbon dating.) Interestingly, the C-14 analysis indicated that the bones were from 10,000-16,000 years old—a far cry from their alleged 60-million-year-old age.”



And the truth is that radioactive carbon is being found in dinosaur bones that have been excavated all over the planet


Real Science Radio interviewed a scientist returning from the American Geophysical Union’s conference in Singapore where his international team presented results from five respected laboratories documenting significant quantities of Carbon 14 in bones from ten dinosaurs excavated from Alaska, Europe, Texas, Montana, and China’s Gobi Desert.



Additional evidence for the young age of dinosaurs comes from the fact that we find very accurate depictions of dinosaurs in ancient artwork all over the planet.  This is something that I covered in my previous article entitled “Why Does Ancient Art Contain Depictions Of Flying Aircraft, Helicopters And Dinosaurs?


Considering the fact that we only started digging up dinosaurs a couple hundred years ago, how did those ancient people know what they looked like?


That is something to think about.


I realize that this article is going to directly challenge things that a lot of people have believed all of their lives.


But we are never going to get anywhere if we just have blind faith in whatever the system tells us to believe.


It pays to question everything and to allow logic and reason to lead us to the truth.


So what are your thoughts on all of this?  Please feel free to share what you think by posting a comment below…


About the author: Michael T. Snyder is a former Washington D.C. attorney who now publishes The Truth. His new thriller entitled “The Beginning Of The End” is now available on Amazon.com.




Powered By WizardRSS.com | Full Text RSS Feed | RFID | Amazon Affiliate

The Truth

Massive Dinosaur Soft Tissue Discovery In China – Includes Skin And Feathers!

Massive Dinosaur Soft Tissue Discovery In China – Includes Skin And Feathers!



Tyrannosaurus rex skull - Photo by EncycloPetey


A fossil bed in China that is being called “Jurassic Park” has yielded perhaps the greatest dinosaur soft tissue discovery of all time.  According to media reports, “nearly-complete skeletons” have been discovered that even include skin and feathers.  But of course if these dinosaurs are really “160 million years old”, that should be absolutely impossible.  Needless to say, this shocking discovery is once again going to have paleontologists scrambling to find a way to prop up the popular myths that they have been promoting.  What they have been telling us simply does not fit the facts.  The truth is that this latest find is even more evidence that dinosaurs are far, far younger than we have traditionally been taught.


Once upon a time, scientists believed that it would be impossible to find anything other than the hardened fossilized remains of extinct dinosaurs.  And if those dinosaurs really were millions of years old, those scientists would have been 100% correct.  But instead, we are now starting to find dinosaur soft tissue all over the place.  The following is an excerpt from a recent Daily Mail article about this new discovery in China…


Almost more impressive than the diversity of the biota is the preservation of many of the vertebrate specimens, according to the study published in the Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology.


Fossils include complete or nearly-complete skeletons associated with preserved soft tissues such as feathers, fur, skin or even, in some of the salamanders, external gills.


One is the feathered dinosaur Epidexipteryx whose soft tissues have been revealed by the use of ultraviolet light scanners.


A fossil of the salamander Chunerpeton shows not only the preserved skeleton but also its skin and external gills.



Wow.


Hopefully scientists in the west will get a chance to closely examine these soft tissue samples.


Prior to 1991, you would have been laughed out of the room if you had suggested that we might dig up the soft tissue of dinosaurs someday.


But all of that changed when Mary Schweitzer, a molecular paleontologist at North Carolina State University, did something that was absolutely unthinkable.  The following comes from an article in Smithsonian Magazine


In 1991, Schweitzer was trying to study thin slices of bones from a 65-million-year-old T. rex. She was having a hard time getting the slices to stick to a glass slide, so she sought help from a molecular biologist at the university. The biologist, Gayle Callis, happened to take the slides to a veterinary conference, where she set up the ancient samples for others to look at. One of the vets went up to Callis and said, “Do you know you have red blood cells in that bone?” Sure enough, under a microscope, it appeared that the bone was filled with red disks. Later, Schweitzer recalls, “I looked at this and I looked at this and I thought, this can’t be. Red blood cells don’t preserve.”


Schweitzer showed the slide to Horner. “When she first found the red-blood-cell-looking structures, I said, Yep, that’s what they look like,” her mentor recalls. He thought it was possible they were red blood cells, but he gave her some advice: “Now see if you can find some evidence to show that that’s not what they are.”


What she found instead was evidence of heme in the bones—additional support for the idea that they were red blood cells. Heme is a part of hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in the blood and gives red blood cells their color. “It got me real curious as to exceptional preservation,” she says.



Posted below is an excerpt from a 60 Minutes video report about her remarkable discovery…



Of course since that time, many others have also dug up dinosaur soft tissue.  At this point, more than thirty specimens have been discovered and tested, and the specimens have come from an impressive array of various dinosaurs


The dinosaurs and other Mesozoic creatures that have yielded their biological material are hadrosaur, titanosaur, ornithomimosaur [ostrich-like dinosaurs], mosasaur, triceratops, Lufengosaurs, T. rex, and Archaeopteryx.



When Schweitzer originally made her discovery public, she was viciously attacked by other evolutionists who insisted that finding dinosaur soft tissue that was millions of years old was absolutely impossible.


And those evolutionists were right.


If the dinosaurs were really that old it would be impossible.


But now sample after sample and test after test have proven without a shadow of a doubt that we really are digging up dinosaur soft tissue.


Schweitzer and other paleontologists that are desperate to prop up their existing theories are now suggesting that “iron in the blood” could have preserved the soft tissue that we are finding for all of these millions of years.


If you believe that laughable theory, I have a bridge to sell you.


But there are a lot of people out there that are so desperate to keep believing their flawed version of “the truth” that they are actually buying it.


If you are interested in more of the technical details of this theory, you can find a more detailed explanation right here.


And of course it is not just soft tissue that scientists have to account for


It is not just dinosaur soft tissue, either, but the presence of detectable proteins such as collagen, hemoglobin, osteocalcin, actin, and tubulin that they must account for. These are complex molecules that continually tend to break down to simpler ones.


Not only that, but in many cases, there are fine details of the bone matrix, with microscopically intact-looking bone cells (osteocytes) showing incredible detail. And Schweitzer has even recovered fragments of the even more fragile and complex molecule, DNA. This has been extracted from the bone cells with markers indicating its source such that it is extremely likely to be dinosaur DNA.



In this case, I think that it would be very appropriate to apply Occam’s razor.  The reason why we are finding dinosaur bones with soft tissue in them is because they simply are not very old.


And when we carbon date dinosaur bones, it tells us the exact same thing.


Due to the rate that it decays, there should be absolutely no measurable radioactive carbon left in anything that was once living that is greater than 100,000 years old.


So there should be absolutely no measurable radioactive carbon in dinosaur bones.


But instead, that is precisely what we find.  Here is one example


“In June of 1990, Hugh Miller submitted two dinosaur bone fragments to the Department of Geosciences at the University in Tucson, Arizona for carbon-14 analysis. One fragment was from an unidentified dinosaur. The other was from an Allosaurus excavated by James Hall near Grand Junction, Colorado in 1989. Miller submitted the samples without disclosing the identity of the bones. (Had the scientists known the samples actually were from dinosaurs, they would not have bothered dating them, since it is assumed dinosaurs lived millions of years ago—outside the limits of radiocarbon dating.) Interestingly, the C-14 analysis indicated that the bones were from 10,000-16,000 years old—a far cry from their alleged 60-million-year-old age.”



And the truth is that radioactive carbon is being found in dinosaur bones that have been excavated all over the planet


Real Science Radio interviewed a scientist returning from the American Geophysical Union’s conference in Singapore where his international team presented results from five respected laboratories documenting significant quantities of Carbon 14 in bones from ten dinosaurs excavated from Alaska, Europe, Texas, Montana, and China’s Gobi Desert.



Additional evidence for the young age of dinosaurs comes from the fact that we find very accurate depictions of dinosaurs in ancient artwork all over the planet.  This is something that I covered in my previous article entitled “Why Does Ancient Art Contain Depictions Of Flying Aircraft, Helicopters And Dinosaurs?


Considering the fact that we only started digging up dinosaurs a couple hundred years ago, how did those ancient people know what they looked like?


That is something to think about.


I realize that this article is going to directly challenge things that a lot of people have believed all of their lives.


But we are never going to get anywhere if we just have blind faith in whatever the system tells us to believe.


It pays to question everything and to allow logic and reason to lead us to the truth.


So what are your thoughts on all of this?  Please feel free to share what you think by posting a comment below…


About the author: Michael T. Snyder is a former Washington D.C. attorney who now publishes The Truth. His new thriller entitled “The Beginning Of The End” is now available on Amazon.com.




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The Truth

Massive Dinosaur Soft Tissue Discovery In China – Includes Skin And Feathers!

Saturday, September 14, 2013

Obamacare D-Day becomes a soft launch


For months all eyes have been on October 1 — the first day people can sign up for Obamacare.


But as that day approaches, many people working on the nuts and bolts of the health law are tamping down any expectations of a sign-up stampede.







Not everyone will enroll immediately. And that, they say, is the way they want it.


Given all the worries that web sites could crash, call centers could be overwhelmed, and the federal government’s data hub could falter as it checks eligibility and subsidies, they’d rather see a slow buildup during an open enrollment season that runs through March.


(PHOTOS: 25 unforgettable Obamacare quotes)


“October 1 will be an important day to raise awareness, but it is the first day of a six-month public education effort,” said Tara McGuinness, a senior White House communications adviser working on rollout of the health law.


But given the politics of Obamacare, expect a rush to judgment.


Republican opponents are going to want to declare the controversial legislation a failure, and the sooner the better. Either tepid enrollment or technical glitches will advance their argument that the law is doomed to fail. They see the White House as playing a game of lowered expectations rather than ‘fessing up to the failures.


“If I were HHS or CMS or whoever’s calling the shots over there, or the White House, I would think that would be a natural thing to do,” said Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), one of the skeptics. “Part of me believes this is Thelma and Louise about 10 miles from the Grand Canyon.”


(Also on POLITICO: This week in Congress: A bust)


Democrats -from President Barack Obama on down – say that hiccups are to be expected when the switch is flipped on the new state exchanges. It’s an intricate system that requires several complex government technology systems to successfully talk to each other — and to the consumer. A modest start to enrollment may reduce any start-up strain.


“There are going to be some glitches. No doubt about it,” Obama said at a news conference last month. “There are going to be things where we say, you know what? We should have thought of that earlier, or this would work a little bit better or this needs an adjustment.”


And it could all get even more complicated if Congress doesn’t figure out how to avoid a government shutdown. That wold be because of the ongoing fight about Obamacare – and it could start the same day enrollment does, Oct. 1.


(Also on POLITICO: Poll: New low in government trust)


The administration hopes to keep the glitches minimal-and to have time to repair them before Obamacare’s public image is further hurt. Alan Weil, executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy, says “no one gets hurt” if a problem springs up in October and is fixed in November.


“October 1 is an important day but no one actually gets coverage until January 1,” Weil said. “No one’s life changes on October 1.”


Democratic supporters of the law say that 2014 enrollment shouldn’t be measured until open enrollment ends in late March. In fact, they say, it may take two or three years to really evaluate such a dramatic new program. The Congressional Budget Office has forecast gradual growth in coverage over the years.


None of this means that October 1 isn’t important— it is. The administration hopes the start of enrollment will drive a lot of attention to the law from the media and on social networks, which will encourage uninsured people to check out the new exchanges. But people are likely to mull over options, and come back to the websites and marketing materials more than once before they commit. They may not want to pay in October if they can wait until December for coverage in January.


That’s what happened when Massachusetts opened its exchange in late 2006.


Jon Kingsdale, who ran the Massachusetts exchange and is now a director at the Wakely Consulting’s Boston office, said people in that state had an average of 18 interactions – web visits, e-mails or phone calls —before they actually bought coverage.


“It’s not going to be sudden, immediate enrollment,” Kingsdale said of the Affordable Care Act. “I would expect very little enrollment in October for benefits that don’t start until January.”


In Massachusetts, about 10,000 new, subsidized enrollees signed up each month over the first 15 months. The biggest spike came in the last two months before the mandate kicked in, Kingsdale said.


Kevin Counihan, who is leading the Connecticut insurance marketplace, hopes for a similar pattern.


“October is really the first month of testing … because it’s the first month I really believe that all the elements of the federal data hub and state interfaces are going to be ready. That’s not a bad thing,” Counihan said. “It’s going to give the states and the federal government time to really tweak it.”


He expects spurts of enrollment in the first two weeks of December — closer to to the start of coverage on Jan. 1 — and toward the end of open season in March.


That’s what Mila Kofman, the executive director of the DC Health Link, anticipates. Consumer education in October — and a rush of enrollment in December.


“We want to make sure that they’re not pushed into making a quick decision,” she said.


Nevada plans to advertise in staggered phases and won’t start directing people to the exchange website until Oct. 7.


“We want to avoid the possibility of a federal data hub crash or massive use on the federal hub so we’re turning the message over to come and enroll in Nevada health link” later in October, said C.J. Bawden, a communications officer for the state exchange.


The state’s advertising now says that the health exchange is coming. But on Oct. 7, the ad messaging in the northern half of the state will change to say that it’s now time to enroll. A week later, the advertising will change in the southern part of the state – a staggered approach to further ensure that the exchange isn’t overloaded.


David S. Lopez, president and CEO of Harris Health System near Houston, Texas, says he’s hoping to get his uninsured patients matched with insurance as quickly as possible. Today, nearly two-thirds of the system’s patients pay for care themselves. But he’s looking at the long game.


“To expect we’ll be a rousing success in signing people up – no, it’s not going to happen the first month or even the first year,” Lopez said. “We have to acknowledge there is going to be a learning curve. You’ll build the momentum and we’ll eventually get there. This is going to be a work in progress.”


Jason Millman contributed to this report.




POLITICO – TOP Stories



Obamacare D-Day becomes a soft launch

Friday, May 31, 2013

Data signal soft economy but not abrupt slowdown


A man pushes his shopping cart down an aisle at a Home Depot store in New York, July 29, 2010.REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

A man pushes his shopping cart down an aisle at a Home Depot store in New York, July 29, 2010.


Credit: Reuters/Shannon Stapleton






WASHINGTON | Thu May 30, 2013 9:14pm EDT



WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A drop in government spending dragged more on the U.S. economy than initially thought in the first three months of the year, although consumer spending looked relatively resilient to Washington’s austerity drive.


Other reports on Thursday showed the number of new jobless claims rose modestly last week while contracts on previously owned homes climbed to a three-year high in April.


Together, the reports pointed to an economy that has held up reasonably well despite government constraints, but nevertheless faced headwinds severe enough to dissuade the U.S. Federal Reserve from trimming its monetary stimulus in the immediate future.


“(The reports) paint the picture of an economy with strengthening fundamentals that is facing significant fiscal drag,” said Ellen Zentner, an economist at Nomura in New York.


Gross domestic product, a measure of the country’s total economic output, expanded at a 2.4 percent annual rate during the first quarter, down a tenth of a point from an initial estimate, the Commerce Department said.


Analysts had forecast a 2.5 percent gain.


Government spending tumbled at a 4.9 percent annual rate, which was faster than the 4.1 percent rate initially estimated. Also holding back growth during the quarter, businesses outside the farm sector stocked their shelves at a slower pace.


Washington has been tightening its belt for several years but ramped up austerity measures in 2013, hiking taxes in January and slashing the federal budget in March.


“We are dramatically under-spending in Washington,” said Michael Strauss, a market strategist at Commonfund in Wilton, Connecticut.


U.S. stocks rose and the dollar weakened as some investors bet the data could dissuade the Fed from rushing to taper a bond buying program that has acted as a bulwark against government belt tightening. Prices for U.S. government debt pared losses.


Despite the signs of a substantial fiscal drag, the GDP report also highlighted a resilience that has surprised many economists.


Consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity. rose at a 3.4 percent annual rate, up two tenths of a point from the government’s previous estimate.


Excluding the volatile inventories component, GDP rose at an upwardly revised 1.8 percent rate, slightly higher than analysts had forecast. This suggests that an improvement in hiring and incomes over the last year has helped keep economic momentum intact.


“(It’s) steady as she goes,” said Stephen Stanley, an economist at Pierpont Securities in Stamford, Connecticut


HOUSING RECOVERY


Most economists still expect economic growth will slow around the middle of 2013 as budget cuts are enacted. But growth is seen picking up by year end, propelled by consumer spending and an apparently entrenched housing market recovery.


In April, the National Association of Realtors’ index of signed contracts for home resales rose 0.3 percent to 106.0, the highest reading since April 2010.


The housing market recovery is being driven by the Fed’s very easy monetary policy stance, which has kept mortgage rates low. Although speculation the Fed could begin to curtail its bond buying within a few months has driven mortgage rates sharply higher in recent days, economists say the fundamentals of the housing recovery still appear strong.


A separate report showed the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly rose last week, but not enough to suggest a shift in the recent pattern of steady job gains.


Initial claims for state unemployment benefits increased 10,000 to a seasonally adjusted 354,000, above analysts’ expectations, Labor Department data showed.


(Additional reporting by Lucia Mutikani in Washington and Richard Leong in New York; Editing by Andrea Ricci)





Reuters: Top News



Data signal soft economy but not abrupt slowdown

Data signal soft economy but not abrupt slowdown


Saturday, May 4, 2013

Bartiromo Vs Schiff: The (Soft) Money-Honey Against The Golden Boy


Perfectly summarizing the cognitive dissonance of the mainstream media (and their drone-like viewers), this duel of the Soft-Money-Honey Maria B and Hard-Money Golden Boy Peter Schiff was a tragic farce. Maria comes out swinging, “whether this is a manufactured market or not, you’ve got no alternative but stocks – where’s my yield?” Schiff counters, “there are alternatives” – summarily scoffed at (a-la his-housing appearances in 2006/7) by Maria


remember…



 


- “we have a completely phoney economy driven 100% by cheap money; the minute you take it away, the whole thing implodes.” And while the ‘fight’ moves on, we are left thinking they are in two different rings since whatever point is made by Schiff is summarily ignored for the status quo.


“QE will be here until we have a USD crisis and the Fed can’t get away with it anymore,” Schiff reminds, adding, “There is no exit strategy… the Fed is bluffing; exit is impossible.”


The glancing blows continue deep into the late rounds. “The reality is we are living in a bubble; and all bubbles burst,” (reminding us of Sam Zell’s comments to the very same CNBC anchor a few weeks back), “it’s unfortunate we didn’t learn that lesson in 2008 but we’re about to learn a much bigger lesson.” Disingenuous laughter follows at Schiff’s suggestion at holding Gold with Maria’s anchoring bias loud-and-proud – “I’m looking for alternatives to stocks, and I can’t find any.”


 


Schiff notes, “the next crisis will be the USD,” to which Maria incomprehensibly asks “what currency am I going to own if not the USD?” And this is where the fireworks begin as Schiff dares to suggest “you could just have real money Maria” (just as Marc Faber warned her “you don’t own gold, you are in great danger” a few months back).



 


Her response, perfection in its anchoring bias (forgetting the double collapse in stock prices in the last 13 years), “gold? gold! what if I get caught in the largest sell-off in history like it did 3 weeks ago?


Schiff, almost speechless at the utter inability of the money-honey to see beyond stocks reminds her of the performance difference over the last five years (to which she smugly smiles at his apparent foolishness) and asks why CNBC hasn’t covered the $ 120 surge in gold’s price in the last 3 weeks.


“Gold versus dividend-paying securities…” she repeats spell-like, weighing the simple decision (in her mind) since, we are sure, she “is being paid to wait,” or is just totally and completely incapable of comprehending that stocks can fall in price and the ‘real’ price of said securities is being destroyed. “It’s not gold vs stocks; it’s gold vs the dollar,” Schiff educates.


 


Eight minutes of sheer comedic perfection assured to go down in the annals of ‘irreconcilable differences’ for ever…








    




Zero Hedge




Bartiromo Vs Schiff: The (Soft) Money-Honey Against The Golden Boy