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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL:
Schumer Optimistic on Democrats’ Chances in 2012
By Corey Boles
Never let it be said that Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) isn’t an optimist.
On Wednesday, the senior Democrat said that if his party was able to knock off one or two Republican-controlled Senate seats in next November’s elections, it would be “almost impossible” for the Democrats to lose control of the Senate.
“When you look at it from 30,000 feet it looks bad,” Mr. Schumer said, at a round table with reporters hosted by the Third Way, a centrist economic think tank. “But when you look at it race by race, it looks darn good.”
Mr. Schumer’s reasoning goes against the views of political oddsmakers, who think Democrats will have a difficult time retaining control of the Senate. They currently have a 53-47 majority, but 23 seats currently held by Democrats are up next year as opposed to just 10 seats for the GOP, leaving Democrats defending more than double the number of seats as Republicans. Analysts also believe about 10 of the Democratic seats are competitive, while just two of the Republican seats are seen as being potentially vulnerable.
But Mr. Schumer sees it differently. He said it was possible Democrats can defeat GOP incumbent Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts, where former Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren is running against him. He also mentioned Arizona, Indiana and Nevada as possible Democratic targets depending on the candidates.
The New York Democrat is far from being a novice in political matters. He ran the campaign which steers funds to Senate candidates in the fat years for Democrats in 2006 and 2008 when they regained control of the chamber and then reached their height of power at 60 seats, a mark that effectively gave them complete control of the Senate.
Unsurprisingly, Republicans disagreed with Mr. Schumer’s assessment. Brian Walsh, communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said Mr. Schumer’s view was “out of touch with political reality.”
hair: [elikatira] - Mood
necklace: *League* Long Daydream Necklace - Moving Sky
dress: DRIFT Mood Dress - Optimistic (New!)
hands: SLink
clutch: .::Mother Goose's::. LaceClutch J (5L gacha at Sound Gravis Beach)
shoes: *G Field* "Alex" Mint
_________________________________________________________________
makeups:
[mock] Stardust Shadow BubbleSky [eye] (free wearable demo in store)
[mock] Hippie Pink Lipshine
Izzie's - Glossy Lip Highlights 3D
I loved the optimistic 50s look of this card. It looks like a pastel paradise.
Verso Reads:
Town 'n Country Motel
P.O. Box 572
One of West Virginia's Finer Motels
Located on U.S. 60, Seven Miles West of Charleston
A New Motel on landscaped grounds, attractively
furnished rooms, TV, Clock Radio, Air Conditioned or
Fans, Tile Shower baths and Vented Heat. Playground.
Restaurant convenient
The card is postmarked 1960. The message talks about how hot yet beautiful it is and is sent to someone in Wisconsin.
Taking an optimistic view, Portman urged the importance of taking "full advantage of 2015, particularly the first six months of that year, when maybe there'll be a little less politics, I hope, to try to make some of these changes, and do it again, with the administration working with Congress."
Built by the Quanah, Acme and Pacific Railway in 1908. It is now a great museum.
From The TSHA:
QUANAH, ACME AND PACIFIC RAILWAY. The optimistic tag "and Pacific" was attached repeatedly to the names of western railroads. Only a few of these actually stretched to the Pacific coast or found service areas there. Nevertheless, the tag frequently implied transcontinental aspirations or a desire to connect with lines reaching that broad area. In the case of the Quanah, Acme and Pacific it was a matter of merely wanting to be a part of a transcontinental route. The QA&P started in 1902 as the Acme, Red River and Northern, a local road in Hardeman County designed to serve the needs of the Acme Plaster Company. By 1909, however, Sam Lazarus, owner of the railroad and the plaster plant, perceived that the country south and west of Quanah and Acme was "ready to open" and that profits could be made by expanding the railroad in that direction. Thus the ARR&N perished to become the Quanah, Acme, and Pacific. The QA&P built into Cottle County and then Motley County, claiming that its eventual goal was El Paso and a connection there with the Southern Pacific's famed Sunset Route to Pacific tidewater. The track reached thirty-five miles to Paducah in 1910 and was extended thirty-nine miles to MacBain, a stock-loading point just short of the Caprock, in 1913. In addition, Lazarus and the railroad promoted townsite developments at several locations, the most impressive of which was Roaring Springs. In 1916 the Quanah owned six locomotives, fifty-eight freight cars, two passenger cars, and ten company cars and earned $63,932 in passenger revenue, $241,196 in freight revenue, and $9,522 in other revenue. Stock control of the QA&P passed to the much larger St. Louis and San Francisco Railroad Company (Frisco) shortly after construction began, although the small road retained independent management with Lazarus as president. The Frisco saw the QA&P as a logical extension of its own line, which began in St. Louis and passed through Tulsa and Oklahoma City before reaching the Red River near Quanah. During the mid-1920s West Texas was the scene of many competing railroad proposals. In the end, the QA&P won only the right to extend from MacBain twenty-six miles to Floydada, which was reached in 1928. Two years earlier the road had also acquired eight miles of track from the tiny Motley County Railroad, which connected the community of Matador with the QA&P, but this branch was abandoned in 1936. In 1931 the Quanah was listed by the Railroad Commission as a Class II road and owned eight locomotives, forty-seven freight cars, and twenty-seven company cars. Earnings for 1931 included $27,126 in passenger revenue, $449,431 in freight revenue, and $9,980 in other revenue. The Great Depression threatened to kill not only the Matador stub but the QA&P as well. Fortunately, however, the QA&P won important regulatory and legal decisions to participate in transcontinental movements with the Frisco on the east and the Santa Fe on the west. Thus, from the late 1930s until the fall of 1973 impressive through trains passed over QA&P rails. This arrangement ended when the Frisco and the Santa Fe agreed to divert overhead business to another gateway. This decision and the era of big mergers in the railroad industry spelled doom for the QA&P. The line from Floydada to Paducah was abandoned in 1979, and although the remaining trackage remained in service, the Quanah, Acme and Pacific Railway-as a corporate entity-perished shortly after the Frisco became part of the Burlington Northern in 1980
The former Tynewydd Junior School in Ogmore Vale.
It was open from 1892-2003.
Like many historic buildings it was deliberately left insecure until it became so badly damaged (in this case a severe fire) that it was declared unsafe and could be knocked down.
Within six months a set of ugly new build houses were in it's place.
Canon EOS 350D
Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6
In the 1950s, optimistic enthusiasm abounded for peaceful uses of nuclear energy. This drawing shows a Ford Nucleon nuclear-powered car, with the radioactive core stored way back in the rear. The black-and-white inset shows the nuclear fuel being changed by a robotic arm, which would be needed only once every 5,000 miles. The engineers didn't quite grasp the amount of lead shielding that would be needed around the reactor. (Drawing on display at Alamogordo, NM.) See also this article from Sept. 2008
I hear that when country and western music is played backwards, you get your truck, dog, and wife back. ;)
Wendover, Ontario.
www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/hundreds-of-americans-will...
Hundreds of Americans Will Die From COVID Today
Over the past week, an average of 491 Americans have died of COVID each day, according to data compiled by The New York Times. The week before, the number was 382. The week before that, 494. And so on.
For the past five months or so, the United States has trod along something of a COVID-death plateau. This is good in the sense that after two years of breakneck spikes and plummets, the past five months are the longest we’ve gone without a major surge in deaths since the pandemic’s beginning, and the current numbers are far below last winter’s Omicron highs. (Case counts and hospital admissions have continued to fluctuate but, thanks in large part to the protection against severe disease conferred by vaccines and antivirals, they have mostly decoupled from ICU admissions and deaths; the curve, at long last, is flat.) But though daily mortality numbers have stopped rising, they’ve also stopped falling. Nearly 3,000 people are still dying every week.
We could remain on this plateau for some time yet. Lauren Ancel Meyers, the director of the University of Texas at Austin’s COVID-19 Modeling Consortium, told me that as long as a dangerous new variant doesn’t emerge (in which case these projections would go out the window), we could see only a slight bump in deaths this fall and winter, when cases are likely to surge, but probably—or at least hopefully—nothing too drastic. In all likelihood, though, deaths won’t dip much below their present levels until early 2023, with the remission of a winter surge and the additional immunity that surge should confer. In the most optimistic scenarios that Meyers has modeled, deaths could at that point get as low as half their current level. Perhaps a tad lower.
By any measure, that is still a lot of people dying every day. No one can say with any certainty what 2023 might have in store, but as a reference point, 200 deaths daily would translate to 73,000 deaths over the year. COVID would remain a top-10 leading cause of death in America in this scenario, roughly twice as deadly as either the average flu season or a year’s worth of motor-vehicle crashes.
COVID deaths persist in part because we let them. America has largely decided to be done with the pandemic, even though the pandemic stubbornly refuses to be done with America. The country has lifted nearly all of its pandemic restrictions, and emergency pandemic funding has been drying up. For the most part, people have settled into whatever level of caution or disregard suits them. A Pew Research survey from May found that COVID did not even crack Americans’ list of the top 10 issues facing the country. Only 19 percent said that they consider it a big problem, and it’s hard to imagine that number has gone anywhere but down in the months since. COVID deaths have shifted from an emergency to the accepted collateral damage of the American way of life. Background noise.
On one level, this is appalling. To simply proclaim the pandemic over is to abandon the vulnerable communities and older people who, now more than ever, bear the brunt of its burden. Yet on an individual level, it’s hard to blame anyone for looking away, especially when, for most Americans, the risk of serious illness is lower now than it has been since early 2020. It’s hard not to look away when each day’s numbers are identically grim, when the devastation becomes metronomic. It’s hard to look each day at a number—491, 382, 494—and experience that number for what it is: the premature ending of so many individual human lives.
People grow accustomed to these daily tragedies because to not would be too painful. “We are, in a way, victims of our own success,” Steven Taylor, a psychiatrist at the University of British Columbia who has written one book on the psychology of pandemics and is at work on another, told me. Our adaptability is what allowed us to weather the worst of the pandemic, and it is also what’s preventing us from fully escaping the pandemic. We can normalize anything, for better or for worse. “We’re so resilient at adapting to threats,” Taylor said, that we’ve “even habituated to this.”
Where does that leave us? As the nation claws its way out of the pandemic—and reckons with all of its lasting damage—what do we do with the psychic burden of a death toll that might not decline substantially for a long time? Total inurement is not an option. Neither is maximal empathy, the feeling of each death reverberating through you at an emotional level. The challenge, it seems, is to carve out some sort of middle path. To care enough to motivate ourselves to make things better without caring so much that we end up paralyzed.
Perhaps we will find this path. More likely, we will not. In earlier stages of the pandemic, Americans talked at length about a mythic “new normal.” We were eager to imagine how life might be different—better, even—after a tragedy that focused the world’s attention on disease prevention. Now we’re staring down what that new normal might actually look like. The new normal is accepting 400 COVID deaths a day as The Way Things Are. It’s resigning ourselves so completely to the burden that we forget that it’s a burden at all.
In the time since you started reading this story, someone in the United States has died of COVID. I could tell you a story about this person. I could tell you that he was a retired elementary-school teacher. That he was planning a trip with his wife to San Diego, because he’d never seen the Pacific Ocean. That he was a long-suffering Knicks fan and baked a hell of a peach cobbler, and when his grandchildren visited, he’d get down on his arthritic knees, and they’d play Connect Four, and he’d always let them win. These details, though hypothetical, might sadden you—or sadden you more, at least, than when I told you simply that since you started this story, one person had died of COVID. But I can’t tell you that story 491 times in one day. And even if I could, could you bear to listen?
Libby, she is so cute, I really love her outfit it's so adorable, I love her hair colour too the light and dark pink it looks like a strawberry ice cream with sauce.
Nadezhda Ivanovna, 79 sounds optimistic and hardly ever complains to the Red Cross workers: “Food is not good - but I do not need it better. Meat? I do not need it at all. It is much worse that I cannot pay for the medicines without which I can hardly breathe. I cannot say my pension is sufficient, but I do have a reasonable way of life, nothing superfluous.” Then she adds after a pause; “I can keep my room clean, all right, but there is nobody to clean my carpets…” The Red Cross nurse, who brought a food parcel from the Moldova Red Cross, promises Nadezhda that she will come with volunteers and help her later that week. he town of Bendery, 40 km from Chisinau, capital of Moldova.
In Soviet times the local Red Cross branches all over the country were capable to provide home care for the elderly in Bendery, 40 km away from the capital Chisinau. Today the Moldova Red Cross is struggling to retain its place in the society and sustain the competition with other NGO’s. The Norwegian, Swiss and Swedish Red Cross societies and the International Federation support the Moldova Red Cross work with various programmes. The International Federation emergency food support operation aims to help lonely elderly, single headed families and families with many children through the lean months of spring before the new harvest. 6,700 people will be able to improve their food ratio in the poorest European country.
Photo: Margarita Plotnikova / International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
Photos of Beakerhead 2014 Event - An Optimistic Evening with Mark Stevenson. British Consulate General Anthony P. Kay speaking before Mark Stevenson.
Photo by: Jeff Cruz
Stylish and smart Italian teenage woman with long brown hair is leaning against a bookcase in a book store at university in Italy. Joyful and optimistic teenager from Italy posing at school library.
The tower blocks at Cruddas Park, opened with an optimistic flourish by Hugh Gaitskell Labour leader, on the 9th June 1962, have had yet another makeover. This latest revamp is more radical than previous ones and the optimism returns.
The local Public House has been totally refitted with the boozer on the ground floor and flats above. I hope the dwellings are well soundproofed.
Thomas Dan Smith was Newcastle City leader from 1960 to 1965 with a vision to improve the city and make it a commercial centre to rival the best in the world. He was compared to an American style 'city boss', called Mr. Newcastle by his supporters, and Mouth of the Tyne by his opponents.
Whilst many see him as a visionary, and ahead of his time, others brand him a charlatan, entangled in a web of corruption that almost toppled the Wilson Labour government.
His most controversial plan was for high rise housing, and the Cruddas Park scheme was part of what was called a 'city in the sky'.
The flats were built by Wimpey to a Swedish modular design. It was later to be alleged that Dan Smith took cash and other benefits for awarding the contracts.
Smith was sentenced to six years imprisonment for his involvement in the Poulson affair.
Taken on 1st September, 2010 at 1045hrs with a Leica IIIf on Fujicolor Pro 400H colour negative stock.