What's in the Wall Street Journal Today. Tuesday. November 15. 2022.

 I just got off the horn with customer service at the Wall Street Journal.

I canceled my digital subscription. So the last day I can read it is December 3.

So I decided to read it thoroughly each day until December 3, and copy highlights and comment on them. Because I'm a kibbitzer and a buttinsky. 

Their lead story today is all about FTX and this Bankman-Fried guy. Never trust someone with a hyphenated last name, I always say. They have identity issues.

from the story:

--FTX filed for bankruptcy last week, but the cryptocurrency exchange’s founder still thinks that he can raise enough money to make users whole, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Bankman-Fried, alongside a few remaining employees, spent the past weekend calling around in search of commitments from investors to plug a shortfall of up to $8 billion in the hopes of repaying FTX’s customers, the people said. The Wall Street Journal couldn’t determine what Mr. Bankman-Fried is offering in return for any potential cash infusion, or whether any investors have committed. --

 

Lemme ask you something -- if some apple-knocker who had just run his billion dollar company into the ground came to you asking for a loan to tide him over, what would you do? I'd throw him out on his ear. Wouldn't you? But the world of high finance is another planet, like Jupiter, so maybe B-F will be able to line up the suckers. It just makes me want to stay away from cryptocurrency all the more. 

 

--KHERSON, Ukraine—Russian forces unleashed a volley of missiles across Ukraine on Tuesday, striking the country’s already beleaguered energy infrastructure and residential buildings in Kyiv days after Moscow suffered a major battlefield setback, government officials said.

“There’s an attack on the capital,” Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram, adding that at least one person had been killed. “Medics and rescue workers are at the scene of the strikes.”--

 Putin is responsible for this whole mess. I hope the minute he steps outside Russia he's arrested and brought up on charges of war mongering. He'd look good behind bars. 

Here is a nutty piece by Mike Kerrigan, who, the paper says, is a lawyer from Charlotte, North Carolina. I guess I shouldn't call him nutty . . . maybe a sweaty Christian:

--While my physical health has held up over five decades, some years ago I discerned a certain spiritual flabbiness. I wasn’t praying much, and when I did, my petition-to-thanksgiving ratio—forget contrition or adoration—was about 10 to 1. 

This was a spiritual problem easily diagnosed in athletic terms: My form was bad, and my repetitions insufficient. Where better to address this than during the morning exercise I already do? I determined to use running to jump-start my prayer life.

When pain introduced itself on lengthy loops with faster friends, I trained myself to stop thinking in distances. The hilltop that marked the end of a footrace wasn’t 100 meters off; it was one “Hail Mary” away. This took my mind off the burning in my lungs, and initially that was enough. Before long, though, something changed.

At some point I stopped ignoring the pain through prayer and started using it. I gave my fleeting aches to God as a small sacrifice to serve his redemptive purposes in the world. In the vernacular of my Irish-Catholic childhood, I offered it up. And then I flew.--

I know I'm supposed to be all praising this guy up and down for his spiritual take on exercise, but hey, I'm a fat old lazy man. I think he has a screw loose. And he's a lawyer. Anything a lawyer writes is subject to extreme prejudice in my jaundiced view.

 

--Yosemite National Park won’t use a reservation system in 2023 after using one the previous three summers, officials from the California destination announced on Twitter on Tuesday. 

The social-media posts said the park has been dealing with an overflow of people and cars for decades. It had previously required reservations because of the pandemic, and to facilitate repairs.

This decision represents a move away from the recent trend of the most popular U.S. national parks instituting reservation systems to combat overcrowding. Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park and Arches National Park in Utah are among the others to have adopted their own systems.--

 The great thing about the United States is all the room there is in which to ramble without appointment, reservation, or regulation. Maybe the national parks are getting the right idea.