Wall Street Journal Haiku

I've often thought the “What's News” box on the front page of the Journal would work better if editors wrote the items as haiku. For example, from today's front page:

• SEC files suit:
• “WorldCom bosses cooked the books!”
• Bankers do gut check.
• WorldCom's bewildered
• workers wonder “Were we blind?”;
• ponder unemployment
• Sam Wyly sharpens
• yet another proxy axe.
• CA's Charles Wang sweats?
• Dennis Kozlowski
• gets two more felony counts;
• tax crime posterboy
• Martha Stewart's broker
• getting federal thumbscrews
• to testify she lied

Well, at least it would save newsprint.

Today's sign of the coming apocalypse: Pledge Patented
Glen Reynolds (the “InstaPundit”) and I are in apparent agreement on the state of the patent system, and the whole Pledge thing…though, I suspect, we've come to the same conclusions from slightly different directions.

The patent system, as Glen says, is now more about creating monopoly power than encouraging innovation as Thom Jefferson intended. It's time to toss it. When A kid can get a patent on how to swing a swing sideways, the system is broken.

The whole question of having “under God”
in the Pledge of Allegiance is somewhat moot to me in the first place–I have a general problem with kids having to swear an oath of fealty to a piece of cloth, no matter wht the symbolism involved is. It smacks of Masonic flag worship (there, that ought to get the religious right going). Aside from the fact that the “under God” part was added in the 50's through pressure from a quasi-masonic paramilitary religious organization, it runs against the libertarian (and secular) roots of the American Revolution and the Constitution. It's a loyalty oath like those of feudal Europe–it just replaces “king and country” with “flag and country”

So there.

The uproar over the ruling is just another indication that the “war on terror” has only slightly glossed over the long-running “culture war” in this country–it certainly hasn't ended it.