5 Stages of Grief

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote a thesis that humans deal with death and dying in five stages - the fourth being depression and the last being acceptance.

Paul Krugman has read the plan by the Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to reinflate the bubble and writes that he is in despair. I will equate his despair to depression, but I have to disagree with him. I am now in the acceptance phase.

It is over - the patient is officially terminally ill. In fact, the officials have made the patient terminally ill, now we are only awaiting the death.

By putting thousands of billions more dollars into the “toxic assets” (read: mortgages on millions of overpriced homes) the Secretary and his advisors and minions seem to think they can reinflate the bubble that just recently burst, and restore everything to the way it was. They’ve even said that their goal is to attempt to restore those “toxic assets” to their “true market value”. But what if, just maybe, those TAs were already falling back down to their true market values, and this massive infusion of cash will go in the inflator part of the balloon and flow just as fast right out the rupture in the balloon that caused the whole thing to collapse in the first place.

However, it looks certain that Wall St. will be able to profit from this. So it will be another massive transfer of money from the taxpayer to the banker.

Blogroll Changes

I’ve been meaning to winnow the blogroll list - short though it may be - and finally got around to it. Currently I am of a mind to link to personal weblogs more than mass metablogs (some exceptions for those I refer to or read a lot). Also dropped links that are now dead or taken behind a wall.

Removed:
Midnight Meandering (He took the weblog private, so it’s useless to link to it anymore.)
Nonlinear Truths (Tom Is Gone, and his weblog has been taken down.)
Freakonomics (They have enough linkers already. Plus I don’t read it all that often. Ironically, the post that is current on their weblog as I write this asserts that there is no such thing as too many posts or links, and as they add up they have increased effects on viewers. But I’m still dropping them.)
Arms Control Wonk (I don’t read this much anymore. But it is still important.)

Added:
David Pu’u Photography (Really beautiful photography, technically excellent, heartfelt, emotional, gorgeous beaches, waves and sunsets, and good people photos too.)
Charlie Stross (I’ve read about 7 of his books, and liked them all. Am waiting patiently for the next in the Merchant Princes series.)
Jamais Cascio (I first encountered him at Singularity Summit 2007. He made sense in his thinking about the future.)
Thomas Ricks (astute observer of foreign policy and military affairs)
TidBITs (This is more of a Mac news website than a weblog or metablog, but it has useful information very often and is a community I participate in, so it is included.)
Daring Fireball (observation and clear opinion)
Real Climate (The sine qua non of climate weblogs, unparalleled. And if you’re going to argue that you don’t “believe in” GWCC, just stfu and stfu. You are wrong. Do you still believe in a flat earth? And that the sun revolves around the earth? Get a grip - the science cannot be denied.)
French Word a Day (Learn some vocabulary and some culture from an American expat living in a small town in France; and she finally has an RSS feed!)
The Casbah (online radio and podcast, from KSYM in San Antonio, 80 miles west of SXSW)
Spouting Off (Mark Gold, D.Env. and president of Heal the Bay about water and especially about water quality, from local Santa Monica to worldwide)
Paul Ferguson aka FergDawg (Quid custodiet ipsos custodes?)

How Do You Remember Someone When They Have Been Erased?

I went to the weblog to do* a little clean up and organization, particularly of the blogroll.

There are a few I’ve decided to remove, and I want to add a few. While there I checked on the link to a close friend of mine who died exactly two years ago today. I wanted to read some of his words, and remember him a bit. When he died so young (49) it was a sad day for his family, and certainly it was worse for them than for me. But more sadly, it appears that the presence he had left behind on the Web has been completely erased. He had a weblog that he wrote to, including poetry, musings, observations and the glimmerings of beginnings of stories he wanted to write. Those are now all gone, and don’t even appear in the Wayback Machine. He’s also gone from LinkedIn. A google search of him turns up nothing. This is sad too. The man wanted to write and was good at it, but was always so busy with life and taking care of his family that he never really got the time to write much more than what he left behind on the web, but now that too is gone.


*(No posts lately, though many items have built up to post about. More pleasant posts to come later.)