| Stock market optimists point to signs of resilience in the wider US economy, citing stronger than expected consumer confidence figures. |
| The dangerous game of prediction separates the optimists from the pessimists. |
| To optimists among them, at the very least the war seems to offer an opportunity for enhanced autonomy within a federal state. |
| For those of us hopeless optimists for whom every nibble is surely an interested salmon, the fly can seem sterile. |
| They are the starry-eyed optimists who cannot wait for adulthood to take the world for all it has to offer. |
| The first is pessimism, the conviction that social transformation is, contrary to the sanguine illusions of the optimists, profoundly difficult. |
