So who is this terrorist Ayers and is he in jail somewhere?

actually, Ayers is an American elementary education theorist. Say what? He was a former leading 1960s militant. Millions were! Tens of millions hated and protested the Viet Nam war. Ayers is known for the radical nature of his activism in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as his current work in education reform, curriculum and instruction.

In 1969 he cofounded the violent radical left organization Weatherman, which was active during the 1960s and 1970s. He is now a professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, holding the honor of Distinguished Professor. Distinguished professor and a terrorist?

Palin’s reference was to Bill Ayers, one of the founders of the group the Weather Underground is meant to tie Obama’s Muslim sounding name to radical anything. Members of the Weatherman took credit for bombings, including nonfatal explosions at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol, during the tumultuous Vietnam War era four decades ago. Obama, who was a child when the group was active, served on a charity board with Ayers several years ago and has denounced his radical views and activities.

“How will you live your life so that it doesn’t make a mockery of your values?” Ayers later wrote in his memoir, Fugitive Days, that his reaction was: “You could not be a moral person with the means to act, and stand still. To stand still was to choose indifference. Indifference was the opposite of moral” So, in 1965, Ayers joined a picket line protesting an Ann Arbor, Michigan, pizzeria for refusing to seat African Americans. His first arrest came for a sit-in at a local draft board, resulting in 10 days in jail.

Ayers currently lives in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, the same neighborhood that Barack Obama lives in and from there one can draw all sorts of conclusions, will, and have. But this I know, almost all of us have done crazy things in our life, especially our youth, that we wished we had not. Life is not so much of where we started or the journey and route we took, but the place to which we now stand.

Distinguished professor isn’t all that bad in my book.

This weekend, Sarah got the ball rolling, by “rolling up her sleeves” and taking a few shots across the bow of the Obama political ship. She accused Obama of “palling it up with terrorists”, saying things that “disqualified him from being commander in chief”, and reminding people that, “Obama see a different America than we do.” Who’s the WE here? We white people? Of course you know that’s going to be how it’s interpreted!

Unlike the lessons John Kerry learned with the Swift-boat attacks in 2004, the Obama camp isn’t going to keep quiet and let such statement go unanswered. Many feel that Kerry lost because he didn’t defend himself sooner in the Swift boat saga.

The warnings of massive retaliation came as McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, took on the role of attacker and said that Obama sees America as so imperfect “that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.” She was referring to an early Obama supporter, 1960s radical Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground whose members were blamed for several bombings when Obama was a child.

Obama has denounced Ayer’s radical views and activities.

On Sunday Obama unveiled a TV ad on the economy that paints McCain was “erratic in a crisis” — a not-subtle suggestion that McCain’s age, 72, might be an issue. Democrats were well-synchronized Sunday, using the word “erratic” and Keating’s name in nearly-matching sentences across the talk show circuit. Several Obama surrogates said his supporters may start reminding voters of McCain’s ties to Charles Keating, a convicted savings and loan owner whose actions two decades ago triggered a Senate ethics investigation that involved McCain as one of the “Keating Five.”

“This is going to be a month, I think, of character assassination,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., an Obama supporter, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” Really! You don’t say! And we’ve got 29 more days to go. Be careful of allowing your kids to watch ANY TV from now til then.

The Milankovittz cycles are recent scientific discoveries, even while their validity is being argued, but apparently well known and understood by many of the ancients, including the Mayans.

Most high school students can tell you that the earth TILTS, but why?

In astronomy, axial tilt is the inclination angle of a planet’s rotational axis in relation to its orbital plane. It is also called axial inclination or obliquity. The axial tilt is expressed as the angle made by the planet’s axis and a line drawn through the planet’s center perpendicular to the orbital plane. Very much like Milankovitch’s eccentricity cycle, the obliquity cycle is not well understood.

The eccentricity cyle is a 100 year one while the obliquity cycle is but 41,000 years.

The theory states that the earth axis tilt changes from 22.1 to 24.5 degrees: a 2.4 degree tilt. It doesn’t sound like alot but it’s major. We are currently at a 23.5 tilt or about mid way between the extremes. The greater the tilt the more noticable are the seasons. The Mayans understood this. How’d they know? How could they have comprehended such information by general observation?

Or, were they somehow able to communicate with their gods, “the God”, in ways long since forgotten?

Maybe we should spend more time answering that mystery between now and 2012.

While last weeks 778 point drop of the Dow for one day was the greatest single day point drop, it could even come close to a top percentage drop. But let’s face it. For the year the Dow is down more than 3,100 points, the Nasaq down more than 700 points, and the S&P 500 almost down 400 points.

OUCH!

And the reality of all that is forthcoming very shortly when the 3Q 401k and other retiurement fund realities come in the mail. The $700 billion dollar bail out can’t change those figures and I doubt if it can change 4Q pain either. Let’s get real about the state of the economy here in America and world wide. It’s not going into a depression though you will be DEPRESSED!

Sometime before Thanksgiving (can you say right after the election?), Paulson will begin the process of buying some $250 billion of worthless assets. And then before he can spend any more money, there will be a new president. That doesn’t mean things will radically change because even if it is McCain, he’ll be dealing with a more Democratically balanced Congress. Ah, reality!

banks will continue to hoard capital, credit markets will stay tight, and loans will get even more expensive. Unemployment is going to keep dropping. Can you say 6.5% unemployment sometime in the 1Q of ‘09, at the latest? It’s not going to be a merry Christmas, or at least not as merry as consumers would pretend.

Lest we forget, we live in a global economy that continues to weaken. The Euro is tanking and banks in Europe are now folding. Oil has had it. The party is over! I smell $75 a barrel regardless of what Chavez would like to see or what OPEC might do. How far the Dow falls is anyone’s guess, but my guess is a lot lower than people think- or want.

As Richard Russell wrote Friday, “Under Dow Theory principle which he’s followed all his life, we now have a bear market reconfirmation.” BEAR is in brrrrrr. Dow FIVE DIGITS will give way to Dow FOUR DIGITS before we know it. For me, that’s the defintion of stock market crash in any terminology.

Societies and epochs have a tendency to follow the line or circle mentality (circly being circular or cyclical).

As we have moved away from an agrarian culture and into the industrial-digital-service world, we’ve left behind some things that are very important. We’re no longer aware of the seasons like we once were when we were a farming community. We no longer see the major cycles that the old Farmers Almanac would remind us. As a result we miss things like the Milankovitch cycles and opt instead for the Al Gore global warming paradigms.

Yet on the other hand, the Mayans were so caught up in cycles (of the heavens) that they lost sight of the straight line to destruction that they were following.

Jared Diamond reveals that the Mayan cutlrue which unexplicably disappeared in just a couple of decades, did so because of their obsession with cycles and their blindness to straight lines. He wries, “The Mayans overfarmed, deforested, and overpopulated their land” without noticing. A 2004 NASA study verified Diamond’s theory by revealing that trapped pollen in sediments taken from the Mayan geographical homeland, dating back to just before the Mayan collapse, indicates that trees had almost completely disappeared and had been repalced by weeds.

It’s also estimated that the Mayan civilization had 1,500 persons per sq. mile. Way too much for life to be sustained.

As a result of their blindness to the straight line of progress in many fields, their population abruptly declind by 90% in a few decades. The opposite lesson needs to be learned by the post-modern world. Cycles need to be planned for and understood because several of those BIG cycles are coming around not too many years down the road.

Can you say 2012?

Now that Paulson, Bernanke, and Cox have scared Congress into helping a handful of financial institutions, we can all take a breath. There will now no longer be a DEPRESSION. Well, duh!

Let’s see now, our unemployment rate is 6% (newest figures being released today) whereas in the Great Depression of the 30’s it was 24%. Many people date the beginning of the Depression at October 24, 1929, Black Thursday, the day the stock market crashed. This was indeed a traumatic day for those who owned stock as sales volume broke all records. And what were those records anyway?

The Dow dropped from 261.97 to 255.39 as measured by the New York Times index of 50 stocks. Most of the decline still laid in the future; the market hit bottom on July 7 of 1932 when the Times index was only 33.98, a decline of over 89% from its high of 311.90 of September 19, 1929. And how does that compare to today? NO COMPARISON! The Dow dropped 778 points on Monday and then came back with a 485 point up day the next day.

If we’re going to look at 1930 depression numbers the Dow would have to drop nearly 9,500 points. It ain’t happenin!

Putin is spittin mad that things have not gone well, Chavez says capitalism is over, and many are saying that the SKY is falling. It’s amazing what we’ll say to get our way. Bush and his various henchmen have moved us closer to socialism with this “Depression-like” scare. If there was going to be a depression do you think Warren Buffett would put uf $5 BILLION to buy into Goldman-Sachs and another $3 BILLION to buy GE stock? Come on, get real! We’re talking eight million in CASH!

Let’s face it, we’ve become SPOILED!

We want our cake and eat it too. We don’t want any sort of bad news. We want raises every year. We want the good times to never end. A recession should never happen. So, to keep the good times rolling teh Senate has passed the EMERGENCY ECONOMIC STABILIZATION ACT OF 2008. Emergency! The Senate has saved us from anotehr depression- that never was going to happen anyway. Tough times? Sure. A few down years? Absolutely. But the “sky is falling”? Hardly!

We give credit to Copernicus (the Catholic church sure didn’t) for the heliocentric principle over the geocentric madness that prevailed until the Enlightenment or thereabouts.

As a kid I was amused at the way a spinning top worked. Give it a hard twist and it stood almost upright as it spun though you could detect that the very top point was moving around in the circle. As the top began to slow down, the point would extend further out until the spin was more a wobble and then it fell over.

Who spun the earth into precession?

Precession refers to a change in the direction of the axis of a rotating object. What’s amazing is that though Hipparchus gets credit for understanding precession and the fact that the universe is one giant clock, cultures way before 200BCE got it. The Egyptians, Babyonians, Sumerians, Atlanteans, and maybe even the Lemurians were savvy to precession.

The Milankovitch eccentricity cycle (one of three) reminds us that the earth’s orbit around the sun isn’t a perfect circle. What Milankovitch figured out is that there’s a larger cycle than the 26,000 year one that the Mayans understood. There’s a 100,000 year eccentricity cycle that could account for the ice ages, and other catastrophies.

You see, when the earth’s orbit around the Sun is nearly a perfect circle, there’s only about a 3% variation in distance from the sun anytime of the year (and a 6% variation in received solar energy). Guess when we get that extra 6% boast (in recent modern times)? That closeness, known as perihelion is around January 15th for those in the Northern hemisphere. Bingo! My warm mid January mystery solved! No thanks to Al Gore.

Ah, now for the interesting facts.

When the earth’s rotation around the sun moves from a perfect circle to a more elliptical one as it does every 100,000 years, our planet receives 20-30% more and less solar energy. Thus when the elliptical pattern is at aphelion, we receive 30% lees solar energy. Can you say ICE AGE?em> You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free……and help us as we move closer to several probabilities for 2012.