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Strategies & Market Trends : Piffer OT - And Other Assorted Nuts -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jorj X Mckie who wrote (18394)	2/14/2000 11:13:00 AM
From: The Phoenix	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 63513

I know it's one that everyone is staying away from...playing a wait and see.... but LU is setting up nicely. Look at that chart! Set up for nice quad top break...and little downside risk - especially at 53/54. OG

To: Jorj X Mckie who wrote (18394)	2/14/2000 12:09:00 PM
From: long-gone	Respond to of 63513

OT but worthy of thought: Conventional Wisdom Rediscovering the social norms that stand between law and libertinism. By Jonathan Rauch Lately I have begun to understand how a Methodist must feel when everyone he meets calls him a Lutheran. People often describe me as a libertarian. All right, it's true that I often write in a skeptical vein about government. Yes, I have come to see a higher, Zen-like power in leaving things alone. I generally do subscribe to H.L. Mencken's dictum, "All persons who devote themselves to forcing virtue on their fellow men deserve nothing better than kicks in the pants." But still. I know, in the visceral and insistent way the Methodist knows he is not a Lutheran, that my worldview is not quite congruent with what most people today regard as libertarianism. It is hard to evade one label, however, when you can't offer another. If not "libertarian," then what? For a while, I tried "curmudgeon." A curmudgeon, in my own enlightened sense, is a person who is against improving things for the sake of it. (These days, "curmudgeon" is not the same as "conservative," because, ever since Barry Goldwater, many American conservatives have been radical reformers.) I tried "radical incrementalist." A radical incrementalist is a person who seeks to foment revolutionary change on a geological time scale. The trouble is that "curmudgeon" and "radical incrementalist" both describe my temperament but say nothing of my beliefs. So I gave up. And then, a little while ago, I figured it out. I am, I discovered, a soft communitarian. A what? You roll your eyes, and I can't blame you. Bear with me, however. There is a fair amount of undesignated soft communitarianism about these days, and it signifies the emergence of an important sort of thinking. A soft communitarian is a person who maintains a deep respect for what I call "hidden law": the norms, conventions, implicit bargains, and folk wisdoms that organize social expectations, regulate everyday behavior, and manage interpersonal conflicts. Until recently, for example, hidden law regulated assisted suicide, and it did so with an almost miraculous finesse. Doctors helped people to die, and they often did so without the express consent of anybody. The decision was made by patients and doctors and families in an irregular fashion, and, crucially, everyone pretended that no decision had ever been made. No one had been murdered; no one had committed suicide; and so no one faced prosecution or perdition. Hidden law is exceptionally resilient, until it is dragged into politics and pummeled by legalistic reformers, at which point (cont) reasonmag.com