March 29, 2011   Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa has installed, with a lot of paid helpers, one of the world’s stupidest constitutions. The September, 2008 constitution is pathetic and dishonest. It is a prima facie evidence of what happens when deceivers hold power and prey on human concerns to twist these concerns 180 degrees in to a massive, rigged system built on dishonesty.

Ecuadoreans apparently enjoy being manipulated. They live their lives dishonestly now and what few truth tellers existed before Correa are now, like El Cioppo, on the take….taking state bribes and playing the game that only the central state can make or break a business.

This willful acquiescence is disgusting and breaks the human spirit to thrive. But having been taught from birth that manipulation is the religion of all Ecuadoreans, it is hard to see how anyone stays sane in Quito or Guayaquil. Of course they do not. Eventually the manipulative psychoses overcomes the mental reservoirs as day follows night. Unless abruptly stopped, addictions to dishonesty overwhelm sooner or later. It is lift off time for Ecuador and the crazy bottle rocket of manipulative living is about to zoom off with really dangerous outcomes.

And insanity is what is now the law of the land. Correa’s constitution demands that all inert, animal and minerals have a spirit, an animus. This is not naturalism as known to Charles Darwin. This is not the common sense conservation of land, sea and air. This is adolescent anthropomorphism now a cult of dishonesty as governmental constitution. And this fact-free schemata to control all facets of one’s life, Correa declares with wild eyed gross dishonesty, will be protected and revered by Ecuador. Never mind that Correa has lied about his incessant pollution of all of Sucumbios Province- a hell on Earth- to hide his paying tenants…Iranians, Hezbollah, ETA, the FARC, Cuban spies, human smugglers and slavers all in one PetroEcuador dump land. The United Nations dishonestly calls Sucumbios criminals as refugees from Colombia. There are no Colombian refugees in Sucumbios any more. Never mind that had Correa been serious about environmental concerns, he would at least insist on auto emissions checks even as busses and cars by the millions spew unchecked. A simple matter to correct but no….Correa inserts constitutionally a full state religion of the false, the polytheism of the fake, fat goddess Pachamama…the new state religion of Ecuador- a corpulent priestess who sells dishonesty.

The new state religion of Ecuador is dishonesty. While one may ask why anyone would want a state religion, mandated constitutionally to be so obviously dishonest, no one- no one at all in Ecuador has insisted as Peru did the other day that Christianity will remain the preferred religious practice, not mandated but sustained by choice under equal protection by the law. No indeed- Correa has legislated a false, fake goddess of dishonesty as the moral ethic of Ecuador. Dishonesty is the new cult of Ecuadoreans. Only Ecuadoreans can chose honesty and we pray their sensibilities will return forthwith.

This Correa popular structure to deceive is expensive. It is also no longer a government but a cult. A cartel. A discredited place for criminals and liars.  With no one practicing honest contractual law or upholding sensible integrity, no one wants to do business in Ecuador because it is so dishonest and corrupt. The Sicilians of Italy tried this tactic for a long time and ended up with a destroyed society of corrupt state-blessed mafia types. Ecuador will be worse because Correa has installed far worse actors from global terror networks who will cut one’s throat as soon as look at you.

The article below notes the stupidities of adolescent anthropomorphism. And it is stupid and childish. Most humans are taught to grow up and end their anthropomorphism. But not Ecuadoreans. They are taught that selfish, childish controls serve mankind best.  In this, they are dead wrong but now revered as law. Unbelievable as this may be, it remains yet another reason why the 9-08 constitution is a pathetic effrontery and must end now. And while you are busy taking the tiny Correa hand outs – aka bribes- to buy your vote like some Mardi Gras candies, recall that Correa seeks to enhance his total powers with your vote this May, spelling out his control over your deteriorated and dishonest world. You can and must vote no. And tell that U.S. Embassy in Quito to quit selling the greatness of the criminal installation referenda this May. Ask politely that they stop making the best the enemy of the good. For yourself: demand it.

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis
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March 29, 2011

AMERICAN THINKER

An Unnatural Love Affair
By Stephen Mauzy

Given the innumerable combinations of psychoses, fetishes, predilections, infatuations, and obsessions that can afflict earth's seven billion human inhabitants, it is within the realm of possibilities that at least one of the seven billion has anthropomorphized a rock and is interacting with it as if it were a sentient human being. 

Preposterous? Hardly, when considering that a Mr. Art Price Jr. of Bellevue, Ohio was arrested for having a public dalliance with a picnic table and that a Ms Sharon Tendler of London married a dolphin. 

If one anthropomorphizes a rock, one is a nut job. If one anthropomorphizes billions of rocks, one is an environmentalist.  The personification of nature is evident in the language. Nature is cast in the image of man, or, more accurately, woman; thus nature is imbued with womanly feelings, desires, and attributes. Nature is lovely, delicate, and anemic - a description more accurate of Audrey Hepburn than of an amalgam of dirt, rocks, sand, and water and one at which your average resident of Fukushima Prefecture would take umbrage. 

The environmentalist's unnatural love affair with nature would be no more intrusive or offensive than the nut job's love affair with a rock. The difference is that the environmentalist relentlessly coerces everyone into his indulgent fantasy -- a grim world predicated on privation and scarcity.  To the environmentalist's mind, nature is like a female mammalian: she can give only so much before the teat runs dry. 

It's a misconception on steroids.  Nature, as inanimate and sterile as it is, is about abundance and possibilities. Professional alarmist and renowned Malthusian Paul Ehrlich had this fact handed to him on a nickel-plated, chromium-infused, tin-alloyed, tungsten-hardened copper plate by environmental economist Julian Simon, in 1990. 

A decade earlier, Ehrlich and Simon famously wagered on the price direction of the aforementioned metals -- picked by Ehrlich.  Ehrlich bet they would increase, Simon they would fall. Ehrlich lost the bet, as all five commodities trended lower during the wager period.

Ehrlich lost because of a contrived belief in scarcity where none exists.  A scoop of earth will comprise elements ranging from aluminum to zirconium.  Consider the number of scoops that can be taken from the earth's 198 million square mile surface.  Now consider the number of scoops if we expand the possibilities 25 miles down to the earth's lithosphere. 

What is usable today is a mere rounding error compared to the overall supply of natural resources, but it is only a rounding error because of human knowledge, which progresses over time. The supply of economically usable natural resources expands as we increase our knowledge of and our mastery over nature.  Iron was irrelevant to Stone-Age man, silicon  was superfluous to Midde-age man, but their value eventually became evident when discovery and knowledge enabled future man to forge iron into steel and silicon into transistors.  

But the environmentalist whinges that we will exhaust what we have mastered and be left destitute. George Reisman, Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics, offers a counter perspective.  

[T]he total of the supply of minerals mined by man each year amounts to substantially less than 25 cubic miles. This is a rate that could be sustained for the next 100 million years before it amounted to something approaching 1 percent of the supply represented by the earth. (These estimates follow from such facts as that the total annual global production of oil, iron, coal, and aluminum can be respectively fitted into spaces of 1.15, 0.14, 0.5, and 0.04 cubic miles, based on the number of units produced and the quantity that fits into one cubic meter.)

The environmentalist will riposte not all resources are alike. Oil is different: once consumed it is gone forever.  Environmentalists and economists have been warning about peak oil since the wells in western Pennsylvania began running dry, which wasn't long after Col. Edwin Drake drilled the first commercial oil well in Titusville, in 1859.

Before Pennsylvania's oil fields became economically barren, though, drillers moved further west and struck oil in Ohio, then Texas, then Wyoming, then California, then Alaska. Prices rose, then dropped as drillers mastered the ability to extract less convenient reserves. The process has been replicated numerous times since, and will be replicated numerous times in the future.  Peak oil in one market spurs production in other markets. 

And there are still many oil markets left to spur. From 1970 to 2005, U.S. daily oil consumption increased to 20 million barrels per day from 15 million, slightly less than a 1 percent annual increase.  If we extrapolate this growth rate a hundred years, to 2105, the United States will consume 1.26 trillion barrels of oil. A barrel of oil is 5.6 cubic feet, therefore, we will use 7.08 trillion cubic feet of oil over the next 100 years.

The numbers are staggering until placed in context: a cubic mile equals 147 billion cubic feet. The entire surface of the earth is open to drilling up to six miles deep (the continental surface averages 25 miles thickness), that's 1.2 billion cubic miles, of which only 48 will be needed to supply U.S. oil demand for the next 95 years.

Of course, we can exploit to our heart's content, but we will bury nature in garbage while doing so. The total acreage devoted to landfill use in the United States is about 560,000 acres. That is about 0.02 percent of all the land in the nation.  Holding all of America's garbage for the next  hundred years would require a space only 255 feet high or deep and 10 miles square.

Perhaps we will choke nature to death instead.  There is the obvious: nature is inanimate, so it doesn't breathe.  Life is different, it has to.  On that front, air pollution has been on the decline for decades, and emission trends from vehicles and industrial sources confirm that pollution levels will continue to decline in the future. Yet environmentalist have gone to great lengths to convince the public otherwise.

Our mastery and exploitation of nature correlates positively with our living standards. The environmentalist lowers these standards by forcing the person of today to conserve today's very abundant resources for generations of unborn persons of tomorrow, who, in turn, will be coerced to conserve these same resources for yet future generations of unborn. The process not only attenuates our discovery and mastery over new resources, it is as absurd as passing along into perpetuity a present that no one gets to open. 

Even more absurd, the value creators -- the people who improve life -- are the environmentalist's chief enablers.  Because the value creators have discovered processes that turn nature into roads, automobiles, hotels, restaurants, gasoline, climate-specific clothing, and other life enhancing goods, the environmentalist can continue to anthropomorphize nature, oblivious to the malevolence of the raw environment around him.