The Simpleton Pummels Gumblar.

Let's face it, I'm just a streetwise aging dirtbag, 11th grade dropout and general ne'er do well but I manage some muddled version of a Thoreauish life and have lots of free time from living on the cheap. I am not an IT person in any way, just a schlub who finds his way around a beat up Inspiron and mends it in the way some other time's dirtbag would fix a muffler with a beer can sleeve.

So the unravelling of May 14th, 2009 can only be described as near traumatic. A Gumblar attack hit the shores and began crippling web sites and making a havoc of search engines. And the redirects were gawdawful. I soon found a work around by just pasting the url snippets at the base of the search description into the browser. Time consuming but useful enough to get to two critical pieces from Mary Landesman at Scansafe and the blogger at the charmingly named Unmasked Parasites. The latter also has an essential tool albeit in a beta stage that allows you to check web site url for infection evidence.

Ms Landesman helpfully suggested that Malwarebytes.org had the efficacy to unravel this thing and so it did.

But the rest of the story is where it gets interesting. Most of the big picture security software outfits like McAffee and such were caught flat footed and useless. The above cited sources both offer outstanding accounts of the thing and its origins that could almost be like battle accounts from world war two.

It is an unprecedented attack with a very disturbing intent, to hijack searches using SEO methods and hitting vulnerable FTP regions in addition to all manner of browser files, media files, system 32 files, registry and memory zones in a clusterfuck mishmash.

Malwarebyte found more than 170 infections and this after 5 harrowing scans with McAfee, Ad Aware, Spybot Search and Destroy, a crack at AVG and finally CA..whee..I got to beta test the daylights out of all these puppies and handle a flurry of wrenching crazy bug events, blue death screens, looping reboots, a barrage of fake ware intrusions, more or less an all out assault.

Each of the other systems did find stuff and kick it out and I'm keeping the Computer Associates Anti Virus coverage as I like the company, McAffee is another critter..obnoxious, intrusive, whiney, memory hog pest thing that is clumsy and dumb. Ditching it was almost as much fun as uninstalling Internet Exploder.

But at the end of the day, none of em found the right stuff and I had already resigned myself to losing the old thing and seeking some new cheap Craigslist rig. And I had some very gifted people rising to the occasion of help with indispensable insights that nudged the process forward and helped me prepare for this.

The real lesson is we are seeing a new phase. This is a real multi pronged assault that could almost be the work of a government although the origin appears to be Moscow hackers and possibly China. As of today the rate of web site infection appears to be declining as noted by Ms Landesman.

And the winning team at Malwarebytes is getting pummled by a different form of attack as if the invaders know this is the only working answer right now. This was on their site yesterday.

"Malwarebytes.org is being maliciously targeted by spam bots who demand in an email that our linking partners remove links to the our website in an effort to hurt our search engine rankings. These spam emails are fraudulent and not from us and we encourage you, our community, to spread the word and add links to us and to continue promoting our products across the Internet."

This, when added to all the other data suggests something like a cyber D Day invasion and may be an epochal event in the lightspeed pace of web world. My own little corner of the battlefield owes its minor triumph to the insight and persistance of the Indomitable Doberman, who suggested Malware Bytes and my office neighbor Brad, who runs a cutting edge web marketing shop . Both gave hours of their valuable time to make sense of this nightmare. The sum of all these participations and contributions was a crash course in current security issues and a vital element in the resolution of this harrowing mess.

Obama's Corporate Tax Overhaul.

...Couldn't be more wonderful. This is change I can believe in. Corporate welfare tax dodges are among the most odious transgressions we have seen over the past several decades.

Yes, some goobs are already whining about 'competitiveness'. Why should we suffer because other nations are too dumb to chase money from chartered corporations in their terriotory for stuff outside their borders, what are they stupid?

To their credit, they seem to offset this by having a higher tax rate in the first place. But it is high time to end ALL vestiges of corporate welfare. There are all sorts of goons claiming this will invite foreign corporate takeovers and other horrors but I'm confident this would be marginal, Fiat is already poised to buy Chrysler and a bit of GM Opel. Arabs owned a remnant of GE Plastics in Pittsfield when I lived there. The Japanese once owned Pebble Beach Golf Course.

I somehow doubt Microsoft is going to relocate to Austria anytime soon. Most of these entities depend on an American presence even as they undermine and rape America, its workers and its taxpayers.

In general there are a vast swamp of depredations that need to be reined in. We have created a situation where speculators who make no useful thing rush to mush us whenever an option arises. Remember scary gasoline costs? A big part of the cost was driven by commodity spot market speculators. Before long, peak oil will do the same thing and it will be worse because speculators will pounce on it as a good trade.

We basically have a pernicious filthy system that runs the course from too big to fail banks to Walmart and they have deftly exploited a crappy rule set created by GOP shills that rapes from cradle to grave. They have booked obscene profits while no one benefits outside of a miniscule fraction of wealthy speculators. Obama promised to look into this and he is keeping that promise.

Petit Manan, 5/87.

From the point where the sun departs, Mount Cadillac, Schoodic Point, Gouldsboro. Toward the focus of Compassion, of growth, Petit Manan Lighthouse.

To the region of goals and chores, it’s Big Bubert, a distant Cape Split and a mist cloaked Great Wass with its family of islands huddled against a brink where the channel drops its floor.

And, in the direction of Resolve, Resistance and Endurance the long trowel of a point embraces the mass bearing Pigeon Hill and the heath draped backlands.

The ears meet a constant sea muted whine of an offshore gull raft. A bell buoy threads through a tinkly soprano melody and breakers mark time with hushed pedal tones..fploashhh..fploashhh...fploashhh… phwaoshshsh…phwaoshhh.

The jet stream has combed the upper day sky clouds into long feathery strands. The water made rock wall is bedecked with a flotsam riot remnant. Human debris includes lobstering gear, bleach jugs, rope of many colors, some dainty shoe from a fisherman’s wife and a melange of logs and spars, some bearing testimony to encounters with humanity and some which appear to have escaped.

And then there are dense scatters of mussel shells often intermixed with storm ripped kelps and wracks busily rotting and entertaining flies. There are even a few small boat wreck fragments and a spiked pier cradle indicating the power of prior winter storms. The rock piles form a contiguous metropolis for a spider species eternally scampering in and out of the extensive cranny matrix.

Petit Manan is a National Wildlife Refuge with a splendid blend of ecotones and habitats including a fat sphagnum bog wooded uplands, meadows and cobble shores. I bushwhacked through the bog for a while following deer trails through spruce so thick at times, you had to squeeze through.

I eventually came out near old field lanes that led to the main traverse road. I took this back to the campsite, stopping at a meadow pond for water. My feet were soaked but, instead of blistering, they pickled from the acidic bog water.

There are two trails in the refuge. One simply follows the eastside shore down to the narrow tip. The other leads through mixed forest upland to Birch Point at the north west edge. The two trails complement each other and between them, feature nearly all of the coastal ecotones from cobble tidelands to upland copses, thickets, meadows and groves.

I prefer the Birch Point trail. It offers upland woods in various states of succession from ericad shrub thickets to beech groves and tracts of fir running to the waters edge. I met my first pair of golden crowned kinglets along the way to Birch Point in the trails high slope copses of heath-carpeted hemlock, young beech and birch. Descending the slope northward are the conifer groves of balsam fir mingled with cedars, hemlock and spruce.

I found a furball scat left by a coyote and some bear tree claw marks on an older beech. Antler scrapes on branches were abundant. Mornings grim, gray beginning gave way to a warm breezy spring day, Newfie style.

The Birch point loop segment doesn’t quite get you to the tip of Birch Point, you have to bushwhack. In my case, the final ten yards were covered in a stealthy crawl in order to watch a group of red breasted mergansers joined by a few eiders. The effort was rewarded by a good long look at their placid, dive dappled rambling, always covered by one or two floating lookouts. Eventually, they noticed me and put some distance between us.

The refuge was crawling with fat, shambling porcupines. I met two on the way back. One was rummaging in the strew of marsh hay bracken left by the high water storm line. I got to within three feet of it before we noticed each other. It faced me ‘til I pulled out a penny whistle and noodled a bit. This convinced it to waddle off and join its brethren at a leisurely spruce tip buffet. The first morning here, a pair of them involved in some sort of off-season nuptial ritual serenaded me.

The song was a melismatic squawk recalling a sampled snippet of a Tuareg musette chorus. Birch Point’s ensemble of ecotones will reward repeated visits. The cove alongside the point houses extensive and fairly pristine soft-shell clam flats.

The area is liberally peppered with deer scat. One night, a small herd sought shelter from rain in the grove near my tent. The storm must have masked my smell. I woke up and coughed in the middle of the night causing them to leap, yelp and scatter.

My last sunset vespers there were conducted by a troop of raccoons searching the rocks and wrack for mussels. The sky was awash with pale bands of violet and was accompanied, for a few glowing moments, by a Big Bubert bathed in late day glimmer. Warbler group lead teams were just beginning to fan off to nest.

Chuck Snowden was my local ride mentor. He is a smart genial African American who had just turned fifty-four. He lives in Waltham Maine and brought me from Ellsworth to the Refuge parking lot. He had recently retired from his job at the Department of Defense and supplemented his income by doing free lance carpentry work.

He's made a good life in Maine, when we met, he was on his way to install Hancock Point and Tunk Lake Road to install 'For Sale ' signs for a local realtor who pays him ten bucks a pop. He's put up 19 in the past week. The way back was more challenging.

I began the hitchhike in the teeth of one of those huge slow spring nor'easters that followed me south. And, on the human side, real Maine gets diluted south of Augusta by Mall Culture. The undifferentiated terrain of the United State of Generica digs its claws in signaled by the transition from colorful old shitboxes and pickups to Saabs and Volvos. This is a more nervous crowd and rides are few and far between.

I waited in Augusta too long and ended up raising my tent at sundown on the pine-clad bluff of an interstate roadcut near Richmond. I got home the following afternoon. A common thread among those who picked me up was a reverence for the Living World in some way or another.

There was a millworker intent on monitoring the progress of the Atlantic Salmon's return. A retired naval officer ran a sea kayaking tour service along the Downeast Coast. Clammers extolled their hunter gatherer lives and auslanders sang their praises to the land.

A week or so after I got back, I noticed an article in the Globe on ground level ozone spikes in Southern Maine. The map pattern corresponded closely to the boundary of Generica's encroachment. Go Figure!

Odd Ruminations on Recent Events.

I've neglected this poor thing, my oldest web child, to immerse in music over at Brilliant Corners, a Boston Jazz Blog.

I've also been doing the daily economy watch, checking the commentariat at Calculated Risk and the Big Picture, following Simon and James at Baseline Scenario and digging my Monday read of Kunstler, who probably needs a rest,

Much of the stuff out there is in a state of perpetual hyperventilation on both the right and left as we Moronicans are an impatient lot. I've been doing the zen thing, waiting to see patterns unfold so my crappy observations at least have some shelf life.

Thus far as we move through cruel April with its Atlantean visitations of cold offshore air pulled by land thermals and rain parades, I am finally seeing some gelling patterns.

Obama puts a new meaning on Teflon or maybe that Greek myth creature who gained strength by contact with the ground. The GOP continues to nosedive with increasingly useless ideo driven nostrums and crazy desperate efforts to delay Franken and unseat Begich, fat chance and they know it but it is what they've been reduced to.

On the economic front, there is no end of bloviation from the investor class which is in denial about the viability of its outlook. All the foolhardy slobs across this vast land who went on a debt binge incited by the best con apparatus money can pay are now emerging and writhing at the likeliehood that the fat and happy past is over as it should be as it was a sucky way to live anyway.

No one likes Bernanke and Geithner is only now beginning to get some credit for a solution or two. The problem is that the Oligarchs of finance have basically killed themselves with maniacal overleverage and these two guys are stuck with finding the least messy way to handle the carcasses knowing that they are level 5 biohazards like an Ebola outbreak.

The most common aspect of Investor class bloviations on, say, Calculated Risk, (and it's not Bill's fault, he is a man of quality), is a wreckless chorus of let it fail mixed with predictable outrage over the haphazard mess of bailouts that was really initiated by that loveable gallows candidate, Henry Paulson. The outrage de jour seems to be about Summers speaking engagement fees and Hedge Fund relations as if he knew he'd end up in an Obama administration two years ago.

We have hindsight aplenty with a near absence of forsight. Boston is in a strange zombie bubble of disbelief as if oblivious to the piano about to fall on it's collective head. My local blog faves, Dan and the 'Outraged Liberal' do a nice job of keeping up on their respective bailywicks where there is much hand wringing over the fate of the Boston Glob..er Globe long known as the nations best crappy paper or the worst good one.

It's spunky chunky nemesis the Hairoil, (Herald) continues to play to the knuckle dragger circuit here of which we have plenty while treading over the thin ice of it's own likely demise when its grouchy commentariat succumbs to the ravages of time and dead tree dailies go the way of cuneiform or papyrus scrolls.

All in all it is a hopeful time for me as I don't care about money or stuff, never owned a credit card, car or home and have no debt beyond minor personal ones. I'm mainly looking into the most place appropriate and valueable models for sustainable farming here with an eye to asparagus beds, snow peas, brassica family things, squash types and stink lilly's like shallots and leeks to come up with a cycled model that produces income steadily across a year. Then I'll report my findings over in The Sustainability Umbrella.

May all be well with you.

Great Wass Island, 6/86

I went with Matt Walter to explore a section of coast peninsulas from Millbridge to Machias. The first campsite was at McLellan Park, a deserted Washington County amenity. It is located within the borders of Millbridge where the Narraguagus joins the ocean.

The absence of any other campers allowed us to pick the best site. Two little trails lead to the shore through a charmed understory carpet of sphagna and ericads shaded by birch and black spruce in wind and sea spume stunted scatterling clumps lining a pink granite slope of descending rounded slabs.

At night, to the south, we were treated to the spinning arc of Petit Manan Island lighthouse answered by the strobing spin of Nash Island lighthouse off to the east. Free from encroachments of urban light glare, the night sky wore an abundant array of stars.

The first day was given to a thirty-mile drive to Machias picking spots to visit on the way back. We passed a plaque marking the site of a Revolutionary War Naval engagement, just offshore, and a lot of trailer homes.

People here are often seduced from the self-reliance of their ancestors by blandishments of commerce offering low budget financing with easy monthly payments. And this is a place with abundant lumber where prior age's inhabitants mastered basic carpentry with ease. The trailers are drab, squat and shoddy. They are hard to repair and have a much shorter useful life than the frame homes that have stood a few centuries of weather extremes.

A few lost souls even abandoned old, beautiful homes to live in new shabby trailers parked on the lawn. Many of the older trailers wear rows of tires on the roofs to secure them from leakage.

We ended up at Beals Island by midday after exploring the Bucks Harbor side of Machias Bay. Beals is an island village consisting of itself and the larger Great Wass Island linked by a short causeway. We checked it out casually and found it to be delightful.

Beals is unique linguistic anomaly due to its long isolation from the adjacent mainland. A bridge linked it to Jonesport in the 1960's. It's a version of Maine English that is difficult for other Mainers to follow, let alone flatlanders from Boston. One of these islanders sold us a few lobsters at the Jonesport co-op while telling us about Great Wass.

It once belonged to a lobster gear seller named 'Okie'. When the tax burden for owning it exceeded his resources, he decided to donate it to the Nature Conservancy with a proviso allowing deer hunting.

Our informant drew some trail lines on our DeLorme guide. What a find! He also indicated the location of a cabin used by Okie's son Gordy and lobstermen in need of a safe storm moorage on the islands east side and told us it was okay to stay in the shack if we were considerate. We brought the lobsters back to camp at McLellan for a campfire supper.

The next dawning day was given to more detailed exploration. We drove the length of Ray's Point where locals of the most modest means still live on waterfront land that would be unaffordable in places closer to the convenience of tourists. Ripley Neck was our next stop. It's an old vacation home hamlet from the late 19^th century featuring Victorian homes and a community well with exceptional water.

It's most charming feature is at the and of a dirt road that descends the necks east shoulder through a black spruce forest at the mid point. The road ends at a secluded stretch of cobble beach shore facing Pleasant Bay. A river made spit connects a small dory shaped islet to the shore that aligns a northward tip into the sea bound flow of the Pleasant. It's a perfect small tombolo and is favored by cormorants, gulls, ravens and roving ospreys.

Addison is the gateway hamlet to Cape Split, a two pronged point that carries South Addison on its eastern prong. This consists of a cluster of small old fisher cottages housing a mix of locals and artsy summer folks.

The Wass archipelago lies to the southeast. It includes Great Wass, Roque, Head Harbor and Steels Harbor Islands. Odd little island shacks can be found on all of them in varying states of repair. Shack etiquette throughout the region allows use of the structures if a nail or rope secures the doors. If they are padlocked, leave them alone.

Roque Island is owned by the Gardiner family and has a substantial family compound as well as an amazing beach. Its shape resembles a capitol H with the beach facing the Atlantic along the south midsection. The family allows day use of the beach and is active in state land conservation. It's reputed to be one of the finest pocket beaches in Maine.

We followed the road south from Beals and found the small Nature Conservancy parking lot for Little Cape trail. The trail winds through two and a half miles of the island's bog and ledge interior before arriving at Cape Cove on the uninhabited east side. Boardwalks and puncheons keep hikers dry through the wetter sections which support dense ericad thickets of sheep laurel and labrador tea.

The trail ends at a rare jack pine copse along the shore. Sure enough, the shack lay concealed by a thick spruce screen a few yards from the shore. It has bunk beds and other essentials for living through storms and cold winters.

A long ledge that drops four feet to the strand ledge of rose hued granite marks the trail end. The inland side wears lichens and sphagnum. The shoreward side displays the banding segments that define the Atlantic boreal littoral.

Tide ranges up here run to twenty feet making fairly wide zones for habitat. The beach also blends from sand to gravel to cobble along all bands to make a concentration of littoral niches for nearly every form of tide life common to this biome.

From the black algae spray zone one descends through barnacle worlds, wrack and periwinkle thickets, the dip and hump region of clam flat and tide pool to the immersed homes of blue mussels and kelp.

Matt decided to head back early while I opted to stay and hitch back later. Of course, I had a primeval ball. A seal visited at dawn's high tide when waves press to the ledge at the trails end. It frolicked like a happy sea pooch in search of shellfish. Eiders hovered warily over wave tips at the edge of visibility.

I made a foraged sea stew on my last day, a Saturday. Gordy and his wife came by for the weekend. I hiked out by the road to Addison 'til a clam digger gave me a ride and an invitation to his girlfriend's house in Harrington. She worked for a fish drying business. We sat up sipping whiskey 'til dawn and I made for the long hitch home after a short nap.

Swirling in the Porcelain Bowl.

I've been watching for patterns on a custom google news feed and notice an interesting one.

The useful Obama news from reuters, bbc and the stodgy quasi honest media sources shows up early day.

Then, a swill flush hits after eleven am as various hit bits from the AP, FUX/WSJ ABC sleaze and so forth roll out with menacing leads masking bland stories.

Then the flush works its way through the system and, by early evening the useful stuff shows up again.

And then I just did some digging on share prices of the usual suspects.

FUX/WSJ is in the deepest swirl with a share price range between 5 and 7 bucks and major losses in the billions. Rupert claims the lack of car ad revenue is doing it.

GE/MSNBC floats above FUX at a range of 9 to 12 bucks a share but the downward tug of swirling water is strong.

Viacom is doing a bit better in the mid teens and Grisly Disney/ABC is between 18 and 20.

It is a truism in sewage treatment that sludge sinks while scum floats so FUX and GE are headed for sludgedom while the others still cling to the hope of merely being scum.

They are all bleeding away billions and won't it be priceless when FUX applies for a bail out? GE already has for its devastated GE capital unit,(technically a bank).

The very thing they struggle to undermine, Keynesian stimulus is the thing they most desperately need but wreck stuff out of arrogance and maniacal determination to hang on to the now dead W world order that has been retired in disgrace.

There is something wonderfully demented about it all. These toxic waste media things are benefiting slightly from the Wall street sucker rally underway today because the street is confident the stimulus will pass unscathed.

Waterheads like McConnell probably know somewhere near the lizard brain stem that scuttling the bill will trigger a tailspin in the Market, like 1000 points down over several hellish trading days,so it's hard to see this posturing as anything but a parade of hideous right wing attention whores flailing in tantrum mode at an electorate and a set of circumstances that doom them.

The Idiot GOP Nosedive.

I've been out of the politics loop for a while having been satisfied to see Barack Obama make it. The interregnum lull of the final days of the Bush Disaster just wasn't that compelling and now the hapless autistic wrecker has slunk out of town to go back to Texas.

The disgusting little creep left a wrecked economy and became radioactive to his own ugly party, now fixin' to go the way of the Whigs.

Corporate media, a half doomed thing, is already up to their old ugly tricks. They failed miserably to prevent the Obama election and inflict a dementia case on us in our hour of deepest peril but they keep scratching the itch till it bleeds..all over them.

Now the half wrecked mess of GOP is making pitiful noises about the stimulus plan even though we are swirling in the porcelain bowl and 70+ percent of America is painfully anxious to see it happen as clouds of doom hang over them like some Damocletion sword on a hair.

A posse of rich, white waterheads is obviously oblivious to the scope of the disaster and they don't know their history. In the last crisis of this scope, the fabled great Depression, every leader with a clue from FDR to Hitler, (a GOP role model minus the genocide), figured out that major stimulus spending was urgent.

I'm basically loving this. I want this disgusting obstructive corporate shill slime party dead, like yesterday. They just wrecked America, probably forever, but persist in honking and snorting about all their usual ugly stuff.

And the beauty of it it all is that neither they nor their filthy media minions at doomed FOX, ABC and so on have any idea how deft and heavy young Obama is. He is happily maneuvering them into a grave while making earnest efforts, giving them a chance to avoid their own burial in a plot next to Whigs and 'No Nothings'.

Shill media is awash with scribbles about how they still have a role outside of what Kunstler calls the 'Moron Crescent', and pumps feeble doubt pieces about the merit of essential massive stimulus, but they still don't get Obama or the way the world now works.

Their own filthy counterparts on Wall street just caused a planetary disaster with fraud and over leverage and are on the verge of being lynched by a nation of hapless citizens who trusted them only to see their 401k's, portfolios, home values and fundamental security foundations utterly blow up and now they are losing their jobs.

HELLO GOP? Do you really think you have any suction with these people? They too want you DEAD, like yesterday and they want to trot out a guillotine for the Wall Street scum who stole all their money and wrecked everything.

So you go dumb scum and obstruct till cows come home. Despite what FUX news asserts, you will not do the numbers in a vote and your thesis is crap.

The elements of stimulus that bear on green tech are really the equivalent of FDR's Rural electrification program to bridge out of fossil fuel addiction. No one now argues that building that infrastructure sucked even though the ingrate southern hicks elect morons to oppose the newest version.

The elements of stimulus that feed immediate money to half wrecked states to cover medicaid and help with budget offsets are wildly popular even among GOP governors except crazy Haley Barbour who keeps Mississippi in a benighted shithole condition.

You poor vicious boobs have no sense of the explosion of fury and discontent that is about to destroy you and you have no humility in admitting that your pathetic and destructive ideology caused this mess in the first place. I'm trying to decide which dance to do on your graves, the Hustle, the Shimmy or some free form thing.

RIP Madelyn Dunham 10/1922 to 11/2/2008

No need for photo fanciness here. I just want to mourn a magnificent grandma. I really wanted her to make it long enough to see the kid win. I'm not worried about outcomes.

When the scary 'kingmaker' James A. Baker III gushes about your run while dutifully handing your hollow shell opponent an endorsement, something heavy is up. When most of the thinking, 'power' core of the GOP concludes your election is a likable thing a sea change just happened. The thinking core of the GOP knows that it is dead. It also knows that McCain is unfit and worthless as teats on a hog. It has already decided to bail.

A big factor in this election has been the death of right wing 527's. The moneybags are either losing their shirts in the Wall Street meltdown like Sheldon Adelson or they are looking beyond at real crisis like T. Boone Pickens.

The Oligarchs have concluded that their world just exploded. They are sharp enough to see beyond the Symbol of John McCain and examine the reality.. an addled geezer on the edge of dementia and death who foolishly picked the most unsuitable backstop ever.

The bible thumper and wingnut constituency of the GOP no longer matters. They were readily tossed in a trash can. The hazards and problems bearing down moot the pitiful opinions of the wingnut vote. The past is being allowed to die and those who fight to keep it have been marginalized.

A grand and interesting adventure ensues. And a recently deceased and wonderful woman was the mother of it all.

Beyond the Election.

Last week brought a few items of moment to the news flow that were buried beneath the rush to obfuscate or illuminate electoral outcomes.

Around midweek, I spotted a piece that noted a foreclosure spike wherein 1 in 5 mortgage holders are now underwater. By Friday, JP Morgan Chase announced a 90 day hold on foreclosure proceedings along with a drive to renegotiate its disturbed portfolio arrangements.

I've been waiting for this. It comes from the industry itself and is a far more significant remedy element than the various kitchen sink muddles concocted by Paulson and Bernanke.

The finance sector is a herd species and doesn't readily move. The mess we're in began in 1980 or so with Citibank's invention of fee based biz models for banking and now it stabilizes by JP's admission that it is time for banks to resume an active hand in managing the trillions it handed out so glibly in support of this disgraced 'fee' model.

Now the other sheep will have to come up with their various versions and begin to admit just how horrid their losses are.

And by re-negotiating on a case by case basis, they'll finally be able to cut the rot part out and reshape their toxic paper into something that has markable value. I'm guessing someone at the upper level of management got a look at the load of implosions on the books and figured the fess up and rewrite was a better deal than continuing to sit on the festering mess.

The Break up on The North Coast.

Late March: The journey in mud season met the crack of spring with its onrush of sun shattered ice floes hastening to their Atlantic end. Great Heath looked like a mercury lake. Blueberry fields were getting their commencement burnover. Overhead canada goose vees pointed north to the line of ice retreat.

We went to the colony's edge with the whole westerly widening continent to our backs. Cobscook Bay provided a park campsite months before its actual opening. Lubec has been abandoned by the present after its sardine industry collapsed. Houses cost less than thirty thousand dollars with acreage. The land is Scot-coast beautiful.

We reached ‘Penobscot Meadows’, Belfast, late on a Friday night. The Innkeepers conducted us to room #5, a small cozy room with bath facing the meadow draped east. Beyond the pensive, wine dark night, a breakfast of insipid ugliness burst surreal upon a warm spring morning. There we were, marooned amidst a nuked muffin breakfast with well-dressed gaggle of Awful White People. The Innkeepers were nice enough. Applied politeness and a skittish nature are occupational acquisitions of a life so encumbered. Nerves tend to fray from the cycles of stranger parades. The nuked muffins were okay, the coffee was real and butter came in little porcelain pat-a-cups.

Entertainment came from two horrid couples and a faded ingenue. One couple had a two year old girl who they tormented with vigorous stinginess and arbitrary denial, ‘No More MUFFINS!’. The other couple, Polyester Quebecois, bristled at any wistful attributions of humanity to Soviets and viewed the world with scared jaundiced rabbit eyes. Ingenue boasted of lobbying for Audubon while still making time to loathe her teenage daughters. Blech! After a quick pay up and pack we were rolling east. We made a choice to travel aimlessly along the coast and let discoveries determine which fork of the road we’d take.

Just beyond the Belfast-Searsport line is a small state park, (Moose Point), that touches Belfast Bay. It’s an oversized rest area that provided a welcoming spot to digest impressions and touch the Sea. It’s a low grassy slope rolling down to the shore. A west edge line of white pines is joined by clumps of benches and grills. The park was ‘closed’.
The next stop was Fort Knox, guarding the Penobscot approach ways. The shoulders of this old river soul impress. The fort, for all it attempts is squat and bleak blocked granite in a neo Vauban style. It has far more charm than the hulking manufactory belching pulp steam on the Searsport side of the river. The Fort remnants, along the coasts, are military industrial fossils of bygone doctrine.

A Saturday drill rehearsal of a Twentieth Maine reenactment was beginning. We walked through the catacombs and over parapets soaking up the sunlight and broad river and bay view. A stop at Ellsworth to buy some picnic food preceded the last leg up the Down East Coast. The route along 182 gave me a chance to touch the distant shore of the previous falls walk along Hog Bay. We even visited Egypt.

The original plan was to cover prior ground only on the return trip but we had to visit The Great Heath and its cabin. I found my campsite from the previous year and picked up some trash. The poncho I left found a home. The Pineo Ridge road net was at its earliest edge of mud season. There were imposing ruts. Nancy managed to plod through bringing us at last near the ridge crest facing the Heath.

It was late March. Melt water fattened with rain turned the placid Pleasant into a respectable torrent. The Great Heath lay beneath the waters shimmering silvery from a rippling spring breeze. Fringed with forest blends of balsam fir, larch, aspen and red maples laden with buds laced with mist, it enchanted with its stillness as seen afar. Up close, it sang its fluvial water swelling song welling its way from distant branch brooks to swaying bay waves. It sang of vernal renewal moving to season of births and sprouting. Daylights clear vivacity was complemented by a star swarmed indigo night far from the noisome reach of urban quartz halogens or mercury vapors.

It was too early for mosquitoes, too early even for black fly simooms. The Blueberry Barrens fields were getting their early burnovers. We left with sunrise, hoping to fish tail out of the Barrens roads before thaw turned them into soup. Beyond one brief push from a ditch lay fairly stable roads. We followed the ridge east until we took a southeast turn near the hamlet of Epping to rejoin route 1.

The ‘White House’ straddles a shoulder of a crossroad between Route 1 and the way down the point capped by Roque Bluffs. The head of the inlet is just to the west. There is a small huddle of old yankee buildings to serve the road and mark the epicenter of Jonesboro. The focus sharpens beyond the dooryard of the White House revealing the teeming water drop microcosm of coastal village life. We had large toothsome piles of scratch made hot cakes crowded with fat local blueberries with quality drip coffee to wash them down. The gentle murmur flow of old Maine voices at pre-church breakfast provided a perfect aubade.

Following feeding, we made a first attempt to find Roque Bluffs. A wrong turn brought us to Kilton Point where we heard distant gull clamor at distant clammers competing for soft-shell meals at low tide. On another wrong side road as
midden testified on behalf of the clam rakes efficacy. This pause preceded a decision to return to route 1eastward. We would find Roque on the way back. The Down East Coast of Maine is laden stunning points and inlets from Ellsworth to Calais.Every one is worth a visit. Petit Manan, Great Wass Island, Roque Bluffs, Quoddy Head and Moosehorn are the main public lands along this wild rural stretch of Atlantic Coast. Our plan was to visit as many as possible.
At Machias, we made a memorable first meeting with a spring rivers roar. The Machias was bowling a tempestuous flow of ice slabs toward their dissolution in the bay. All strained through sluices in a frenzied rush of bashing, scraping and skittering end over kettle. We stared into the whirl awhile listening to the rivers boisterous expulsion of winters decaying fetters. Past the elderly abandoned railhead and the Middle Machias estuary is an archaic concrete bridge to cross the East Machias and link Route 1 with 191, an old coast road.

It’s the main coastal thoroughfare for the huge wing of granite that now carries Whiting, Cutler, Trescott and Lubec. It’s the easternmost, wildest stretch of the coast, a land of little leprechaun hills and hollows riotously festooned with boulder erratics rising from blueberry moor carpets. To give it a bit of spookliness, one soon meets a thicket of antennae belonging to a Navy Communications station on Little Machias Neck near Cutler. It’s hard to hide but, thankfully, off limits.

The region has other DOD oddities tucked into its backwaters including an Air Force Winter Survival Camp and a weird little officers club on Schoodic Point. 191 heads north to West Lubec near Bailey’s Mistake, a cove providing harborage for South Trescott. A dirt coast road continues east.

We stopped a quarter mile beyond and climbed a small granite nubble overlooking the coast. There is a sparse pebbled beach nearby and traces of a long abandoned attempt at improvement. This consisted of a graded driveway long overgrown with heath shrubs. The nubble provided a great observation point for Grand Manan Island with its steep granite cliffs just across the channel. It ran along an east-west alignment and screened the road from the shore should the road ever be busy.

The tract was a charming micro biome with a few mini marshes, alder and yellow birch groves and a seaside stand of black spruce. There is a thirty-foot slope to the strand and a score of miles of ocean to separate Grand Manan. Within the same distance offshore as the walk to the road, there is a sharp drop in depth to sixty, then ninety feet and deeper into the channel.

Following this pause was the final stretch to West Quoddy Head, the eastern edge of the US and the boundary of the Eastern and Atlantic Time zones. Within five minutes, we were parked near the candy-striped lighthouse at the head. We looked out to sea from cliffside and descended steps to the shore. A large marine granite erratic edging the channel was the eastern tip of our journey. The rest of the US was behind us.

Along the shore, brawny waves tumble cobbles noisily with the highest tides along the US Atlantic coast like an oversized maraca chorus. After gathering a few attractive stones, we went landward to explore the mossy forest. It was June warm in late March, blatant lamb weather. Lubec is a sardine ghost town. The fishery collapsed and left a sardine museum full of rusty gear as a keepsake. We weren’t able to scare up food more complex than corn chips.

The newspaper, ‘Quoddy Tides’, (easternmost paper in the US), listed ridiculously low prices for homes and land along with charming gossip columns by elderly ladies about the neighbors dahlias or who visited who. Following a swing through Lubec, we visited Cobscook State Forest. It was technically closed but the gate padlock was left open. We let ourselves in and drove around the forest roads through groups of campsites.

The food search continued at Dennysville. It ended at the Dennys River where a combination store/diner fed us the best scallops and clams I’ve ever had. They were fried to perfection and coated with a thin tempura like batter. All you can eat cost around seven dollars. There were also a number of homemade cream pies. This place, by itself, justifies the eleven-hour drive from Boston.

After this food wallow, we returned to Cobscook and picked a campsite on a thumb of land next to the mouth of Burnt Cove. A small, tree clad islet sat in an inlet before us to the east. Beyond lay Whiting Bay. A wide broad picnic meadow lay to the northeast. Moosehorn guards the west. Canada goose vees and eider lines crossed the sky following opening waters northward. The soil was semi-frozen, plastic and studded with frost heaves. Sleep was serene.

Whiting Bay at dawn was a sheet of glass in the mid point of its cycle of between surging and receding. The morning eider chorus used indefinite temperament to voice an intricate staccato melody in a lower register.

We found Roque Bluffs on the way home after another transcendent breakfast at the White House. It’s a remnant summer colony from the turn of the twentieth century. There is even an octagon house that had weathered brick red paint trimmed with dark forest green.

Roque Bluffs State Park overlooks Roque Island on the eastern side of Englishman Bay. It’s a cobble beach sliver of crushed granite micro pebbles enroute to sand with a wide tide range near 24 feet. At the crest of the bluffs separated by the road, is a freshwater pond inhabited by trout below with a flotilla of great black backed gulls. The ecotone mix puts fresh waterfowl and shorebirds in close proximity. It’s a perfect spot for a picnic lunch.

We began the long return to Boston stopping at Schoodic Point at midday. We climbed around the Points’ broad slabs of cubist granite sheets divided here and there by tar black basalt filling ancient fissures deep pocked by wind and waves. Beyond Schoodics’ tip, low flying eider lines skimmed the rising wave tops. The oceans’ tumbling tumult blasts the rock, punctuating its’ pulse with roaring crashes to leave a lingering glimmer of mist. One last visit brought us to spring snowmelt waters sliding over sphagnum jeweled rocks beneath the beeches girding Maiden Cliffs, north of Camden. The sturdy beeches hug the steep slopes and were at earliest burst of the season’s chartreuse bright bud tips. All that remained was the long tedious haul along Route One to the highway.

Sorta Sums it All Up.

The Euro Press is free to have a sense of humor and little vested interest in promulgating the myth of functionality in a McCain presidency. This is probably a good candidate for viral dispersal. Gramps blew it and now the annals of Minnie Moose will be a minor sideshow.

The markets are up to nasty tricks. We get a short sucker rally for the first hour or so of trading then all gains are wiped out and the loss avalanche resumes. Yesterday brought tidings of 401k status to many households and the news wasn't likely to be good.

I'm betting New York City will hit bottom with the markets as the financial industry expansion unwinds and thousands of discredited traders, analysts and their hapless staffs all decamp to move in with parents while they figure out their employability issues. Boston could probably lose another 10 to 20 thousand financial sector jobs as well.

And Joe the Plumber had bad timing for a business expansion.

Downeast Sojourn Part 4: Going Home.

Late Sunday--sunset.

Ha Ha Ha! Boy did I fuck up! I'm just past the Stueben-Millbridge line. I completely forgot how far East I am. A look at the map reminds me I'm only forty miles from New Brunswick! I'm at least six hours drive from Portland! Oh well. Dum de dum dum.

When I get back, I'll have to calculate the total distance I walked. It could've been sixty miles.

So far.

Roosts

9/30 Westfield Hotel, Portland (fleabag).

10/1 Crocker House, Hancock Point.

10/2 Schoodic Bog.

10/3 Barrens I, Cherryfield.

10/4,5 Barrens II, Cherryfield.

10/6 Route 1 pond overlook, Steuben.

So now I'm back to everyday life wearing clothing and using abstractions like time instead of watching the sun. I'm back on paved and numbered roads.

It's a days hitch to Portland. At least, now, I'm at a jump off consisting of a five or ten yard walk to the highway at dawn. Hopefully, someone with business in Portland will get me there in one ride. Whatever. I'll be back tomorrow. Still on map 25. Over and out.

Monday: Yay. I'm at the bus stop, waiting on a 4:00 southbound. As far as I'm concerned, I'm ahead at this point, Steuben to Portland in about six hours, give or take a few minutes.

Ms Sparrow, of Lubec enroute to Bangor, led the charitable with a stated fondness for folkies and other coffee house strummers. Jim Lynch, Hood Sails rep enroute to Thomaston, pointed out his favorite features of Penobscot Bay. Donny Houchin, Cherokee folk singer with war wounds from Khe San, got me to Damariscotta.

The leg from Damariscotta to Wiscassett was covered by a huge comical ironworker headed to Augusta for a vote on a weak contract with Bath Iron Works. "If it's a tie vote and it's up to me, we ain't workin' tomorrow".

A small business consultant who enjoyed classical music got me to Bath. A silent fellow got me to Falmouth and a coupla' cokehead hot shits brought me to the Congress St. exit ramp.

Jim Lynch makes a good living from little boats; yachts and such always need sails. He's built a few of his own and was building a house. He told me a lot about emerging entertainment needs as more people who don't need to be near a city move to Bar Harbor and environs. They want to return to land less stifled by encroaching mechanism choke. He mentioned an auditorium and an imaginative jazz club in Bangor.

I was invited to visit several homes, Charlie Hutchins place in Cherryfield, Jim's at Bluefields and Donny's place in Damariscotta.

Donny needs a hand. He wants to die cause his back is a wreck thanks to a combat stint in Vietnam with the Marine Corps. His mother was one of the remnant Cherokees missed by Jackson's agents during the death march called the Trail of Tears. They lived in their cove cabin home over the years to watch their ancestors grave land drown beneath rising waters from Howard Baker's pork tub Tellico Dam. She died cursing the Euroids and I say, "Good for her!"

He wanted to die. Three discs removed and now they want to take out another. With inspired stinginess, the service only allows him partial disability status even though he can't lift more than twenty pounds. Before the war, he could make a forty-yard dash in 4.7 seconds. He even tried out for the Redskins.

He's played guitar for 21 years but now he can't stand to sing or play. His life's flame is at a low glow. I tried to encourage him to fight the Beast. Why make it easier for them by dying? I urged him to sue the Corps for full disability.

What the fuck! I know useless slobs who have chiseled five to six figure insurance fraud incomes over far more dubious mishaps. I told him about Harvard's Native American Law Project and about the encouraging number of humane Vietnam Era veterans now entering Congress.

I offered to introduce him to Gordon and Rounder in order to provide more reasons. I suggested he look up the history of the Five Civilized Nations. His response brought the house down. "I tried but it's so sad while the history of the invaders is so bright and upbeat, I couldn't stand to read anymore".

Oh well. I told him how the five nations and the northern nations refrained from significant warfare with the Continentals while the issue was in doubt. This was one of General Washington's main fears. I told him about the Mohawk Longhouse Council and how it gave Benjamin Franklin useful ideas for framing the Constitution.

This seemed to encourage him. I can hope so anyway. He gave me a feather work as an honor token and resolved to spend the day looking for turquoise to work for its healing properties. I told him about Nyah Nyah finding more reasons to write it. It'll be a fat heap of bile and spleen to climb by the time I begin, maybe in the coming year.

The steelworker and the consultant both had stories about shipbuilding.

The steelworker complained about management's attempt to introduce a two-tier wage system, reduce health coverage and cut wages by ten percent. The first two items were the worst. Tiered wages erode a union's unity and insurance coverage is vital in a calling as hazard prone as shipbuilding.

The consultant told me most federal contracts at Bath are now met on time and at cost as a result of accounting and award procedure improvements such as commissioning several ships at once, instead of one. He thought Bath was weakest at landing commercial design and building contracts.

The average commercial contract is for three ships a year and Bath is lucky to finish 2.7. This is exacerbated by fairly primitive drafting requirements. They rarely use more than six blueprints and about a three inch keel thickness overall, (that's commercial, not federal). Pretty amazing when you consider the truckload of blueprints it takes to specify an F-16.

The consultant also cared about music and had an avid interest in my description of funding programs in Massachusetts like "New Works" and "Heritage". The components for a vivacious life are certainly there.

Maine will always be one of my favorite places. If I don't abandon America, I'll try to be a geezer in a small house on some Downeast neck near the Heath. That will cover my need for contact with the world beyond shopping malls. There, "outside" is a term endowed with meaning. Even the cities are a break from stupid Boston and drab New York. People are kinder, more distinct and tend to be more in tune with the essentials.

I'd also rather wander here than merely visit another country. It's as foreign as I need a place to be without the nuisance of a passport. It's as close as New England gets to frontier with a visible, if low profile, Native American population.

And, of the outdoors... everyone should try just once to forget Time and live by sun cycles. Walk naked in thick bog underbrush for a while and you'll understand why animals are 'graceful'. One needs grace to move easily through thickets without getting scratched and cut. Clothes were on of our earliest abstractions to numb our touch of the actual world. Knowledge of woodcraft sharpens perception, especially senses of sound and smell, which become guides instead of mere entertainers.

Election Collides with Economy.

So I'm sitting at Shay's in Harvard Square today with Chalfen, who is a regular, sipping coffee while he engages a turkey sandwich outside so I can smoke butts as I am a nicotine pariah.

A posse of ridiculous metrosexual Harvard swells parks in the adjoining table and the alpha swell starts pontificating on the 'debate'. My god, these fuckers are dumb and Harvard square always creeps me out.

So he's yammering about McCain, obviously anxious for the addled old coot as if an Obama Election means he and his will be guillotined or something.

It was pretty clear that the little hoggy doofus sees McCain, the symbol, of whatever continued privilege the lad has come to expect as class enemies are as fond of entitlement as the most rabid mythic welfare queen.

If anything, the two archetypes have more in common with each other than they do with the rest us of who actually toil for our pittances. In a fight, though, I'd bet on the Welfare Queen.

But young Swell's huge failure was to see past the symbol and check the human, a dodgy old wreck in obvious early stages of dementia with a well documented self control problem and no clue about the most urgent problem we all face, a cratering economy caused by the biggest systemic swindle pattern of our life time.

Shit, the GOP could run a talking Hamster for all the Swell cares as long as his privileges are covered.

And out there in the broader world that young Swell meets with a delightful obliviousness , there are reported losses of as much as TWO TRILLION DOLLARS from the Wall Street debacle. Who lost it, you ask, well you did if you have an evil 401k plan or a dodgy retirement account at, say., the Global Buttrape Mutual Fund.

It. Is. Soo. Fawking. Sad. I don't care if the losses accrued to progressives, evangelicals or the most ridiculous boosters of the Neocon experiment. I can't say any of these people deserved to get totally fucked over like this.

I don't have any 'exposure'. I despise money grubbing and have minimal expenses so I can hit hog heaven on 300 bucks a week and sip my cheap 211 Steel Reserve while smoking Top 'rollies'

It began with Reagan. "Lets get rid of every intelligent protection ever devised to solve problems caused by the last Great Depression so we can have an even bigger and better Great Depression this time around." Those old hollywood coots do love their sequels..

And thus we suffer through a long nearly 30 year hell night of wage stagnation and stupid booby prizes like 401k that want you to use speculation as a bank account. And every major and minor corporation forgot about market share and moving boxes off the loading dock and turned to agonizing about their earnings and whether some Wall Street cocksucker would be pleased with the quarterly number.

The fix was in. The worthless, vicious speculation tail began to wag the valuable honest productivity dog.And most of hapless America went along with it.

At one point in our lunch convo, Chalfen said..'But most people don't understand the economy".

My reply: "That's like a hunter gatherer not knowing how to find the Caribou or where the fish are in a stream." Uuh, you better figure it out as it a hell of a lot more important than the contestant outcome on some worthless TV dogshit like "American Idol".

Young Obama is moderately clueless but he is earnest and listens and knows there is a huge problem while McOld just wants to pretend it isn't there cause his criminal pal Phil Gramm told him 'it's just whining'. Jeeze the geeze can't even remember how many bloat dumps he owns.

But he shares something with young Mr. Swell, that entitlement thing. Gramps figures he should be president cause he waited in line dammit!

Someone forget to mention that he has to actually have ideas, be fit and solve critical problems.

But then 'W' got a bloody MBA from Harvard, the first 'MBA' president and we know how that turned out. Obviously, Harvard needs to chug a few gallons of Shut The Fuck Up. With any luck, young Obama will redeem the sleazy old hag of a school from it's long run of horrific lapses.

Lord Keynes is in the House.

I love the quotes below and have saved them for years. Boy is it ever time to trot them out again.

"Keynes affirmed the central role of liberal ethics in economics -- and urged the progressive archbishop to speak out forcefully on issues of economic and social justice. This was, after all, an economist who, on a different occasion, had said modern capitalism was "absolutely irreligious, and without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers," and who cursed "the hag-ridden" worship of "the money-motive."

"Keynes instead foresaw a time when "the love of money as a possession -- as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life -- will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease."

Keynes was just as unambiguous about the role we could expect of conservatives in helping reach such a world: "Conservatism leads nowhere; it satisfies no ideal; it conforms to no intellectual standard; it is not even safe, or calculated to preserve from spoilers that degree of civilisation which we have already attained."

"Moreover, he left no doubt about how their resistance to liberal reforms ought to be addressed. "There is no reason," he wrote, "why we should not feel ourselves free to be bold, to be open, to experiment, to take action, to try the possibility of things. And over against us, standing in the path, there is nothing but a few old gentlemen tightly buttoned up in their frock coats, who only need to be treated with a little friendly disrespect and bowled over like ninepins."

Aside from the fact that the vile Chicago School is now in utter disrepute and some are finally noticing Adam Smith's more important pieces on Justice, it is slowly dawning on people that the GOP fraud mess is beyond any thing life prepared them for. I'm no longer even watching the election that closely as McCain is obviously in early stages of dementia and Palin couldn't run the proverbial Peoria, let alone oversee a giant mess that calls itself the USA.

The conventional economy is toast with giant automakers and huge states like California lining up with their hand out. Given the leverage unwind at some cited ratio of 35:1, the financial disaster will not be solved by a 700 billion dollar bandaid. This mess is beyond any useful government intervention until the fraud meisters are allowed to implode and die.

But the odd thing I'm seeing is on the sustainability side. Evidently, the solar power people are having demand skyrockets and supply bottlenecks at a time when many other sectors are in the toilet.

It is interesting to see an odd, if tiny, hot sector rise from this implosion and it might repay careful watching.