May 7, 2010  Ever wonder why Ecuadoreans watch as president Correa snatches, grabs, oozes, lurks and steals your liberties like a thief in the night? The simple answer is because….you let him. In fact, you constitutionally gave him that right in that pathetic 9-08 Cuban-Chavez-Correa ALBA constitution which basically states that all rights and freedoms are from the state- the state of Correa’s Cuban communism run by one man and his team of perps and pervs in power. This means of course that Ecuador is a dictatorship. It also means that Ecuadoreans handed over their so called faith as Catholics to be run by the state and for the state. This surreal transfer of freedom breaks the Biblical teaching that freedom is a gift from God alone which man must not harm or steal. But Correa has legalized his taking of freedom and you let him.

Ecuador will never have true freedom, no matter what Correa lies about and you pretend as your right to manipulate, unless and until the state exists to protect freedoms which was never the state’s to take away. Here is a piece on the cornerstone of the USA’s view on God’s gift of freedom- fully enshrined in the USA constitution and its government. Note that you will never ever experience such credence by the bankrupt Correa cartel of mobsters whose actions have denied God’s gift of freedom. To be sure, this kills open media, freedom of speech, real justice, education, jobs creation and on and on. Nothing at all about Correa’s Ecuador is open, free or fair. It is a manipulative game of what should be and what could be.

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In God We Trust  

BABALU  Marta Darby, on May 6, 2010, at 3:34 pm

Today is the National Day of Prayer.

If some groups in our country had their way, today would be the last Day of Prayer celebrated nationally. I don't know what their beliefs are (or if they even have any, outside of not believing that there is a God).

But I do know this: There is no way you can go to our nation's capital and continue to argue that this great country was not founded as a specifically Christian nation. A year ago, I might have been swayed by the "America is not a Christian nation"argument, but no more.

One year ago we traveled to Washington D.C. and saw for ourselves that just the opposite was true.

It was there that I began to take notice that the references to God were many and frequent. In fact, every speech quoted by the Founding Fathers, every letter they wrote and now in every monument, engraved in stone are their words continuing to profess their faith in a good and providential God.

Honoring God was obviously a high priority in their lives and in creating this great experiment called America. I say obviously because their words began jumping out at me. I was overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude and an awareness of God's sovereignty in allowing this country to be established in His name.

The Smithsonian.
The Jefferson Memorial.
Arlington National Cemetery.
The Lincoln Monument.
The corner of the painting, The Embarkation of the Pilgrims by Robert Walter Weir in the Capitol Rotunda.
In the Presidential Oath.
And my personal favorite: The capstone of the Washington Monument.

The National Park Service displays a replica of this capstone at the top of the monument. It is a pyramid which has four sides to it. Of course, the actual capstone is at the 555 foot level at the top and cannot be seen. It's made out of metal because the Washington Monument is the highest point in the city. It therefore also acted as a lightning rod.

What is not visible is the inscription on the East Side of the capstone. It simply reads in Latin, "Laus Deo," or "Praise be to God." (The reason the photo is so blurry is because the capstone was pushed against the wall on this particular side - shame on the NPS for trying to obscure it! - and I had to bend myself into a pretzel to get the photo of this, but that's not important right now.)

The words, Laus Deo, "Praise be to God" are facing the East because it is the very first spot in the city of Washington D.C. that the sun hits as it rises. It was placed there very deliberately in the hopes that the very first rays of the light of the sun each morning would cause this country to give glory to God.

Let that sink in for just a moment.

From atop the Washington Monument you can take in a beautiful panoramic view of the city. The original plan of the designer, Pierre Charles L'Enfant, can be easily discerned from that vantage point.

The White House to the North, the Jefferson Memorial to the South, the Capitol to the East and the Lincoln Memorial to the West you can see that the city was very obviously designed in the shape of a cross.

I believe in a good and powerful and merciful God. I believe it was by His gracious providence that this amazing country was established.

I am very, very proud to be an American. I love this country. Having fled communism in Cuba, I love and appreciate the freedoms we enjoy here in the U.S. When I was in school, we were taught that the Pilgrims risked everything to come here to this savage land to escape religious persecution. That's no longer being taught in our California public schools. And sadly, religious persecution still exists.

I'll be on my knees today. I'll be praying for many things, but mostly that everything this nation was founded on and stands for, would never, ever be obscured.

Laus Deo.

"Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged." ~ Ronald Reagan

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ECrisis also post from BABALU this first hand look at the hands of liberty:

Carlos Alberto Montaner
BABALU Val Prieto, on May 6, 2010, at 2:30 pm

Via the Cato Institute, the following is Carlos Alberto Montaner's speech upon receiving an award from the Instituto Juan de Mariana for defending liberty:

Freedom for What?*

In 1980, shortly after making a dramatic exit from Cuba, the magnificent writer Reinaldo Arenas collected in a book his more combative articles and essays and titled it “The Need for Freedom.”

It was a shout. Reinaldo felt the need to be free. Human beings need to be free. He was asphyxiating in Cuba. He lived in sadness, fear and indignation. None of those three emotions is pleasant, and sometimes they twisted in his heart to the point of desperation.

After finding exile, Reinaldo felt profound relief and said something that was both wondrous and painful: for the first time, he had shown his true face. He had “unmasked” himself and felt the warm sensation of being himself, without the fear that such an act might bring him punishment and alienation.

In totalitarian societies, the pain of not being free and moving about in disguise becomes somatic in various ways, from a knot in the throat to a diffuse malaise expressed by assorted neurotic behaviors.

What is freedom? It is the ability we have to make decisions based on our individual beliefs, convictions and interests, without external pressures.

Freedom is choosing the god who best fits our religious perceptions, or choosing no god if we don’t feel the spiritual need to transcend.

Freedom is fearlessly offering our affection and loyalty to the people we love, or to the groups with which we feel a kinship.

Freedom is choosing without interference what we want to study, where and how we wish to live, the ideas that best reflect our vision of the social problems or the ideas that best seem to explain them.

Freedom is selecting the artistic expressions that please us the most, or, conversely, rejecting them without consequences.

Freedom is being able to undertake or renounce an economic activity without reporting to anyone, beyond the formalities established by law.

Freedom is spending our money as we see fit, acquiring the goods that satisfy us and disposing of our legitimate properties. Without freedom, the creation of wealth is weakened to the point of misery.

José Martí, the illustrious journalist who generated Cuba’s independence, contributed another definition: “Freedom is the right of every man to be honest, and to think and speak without hypocrisy.”

Tyrannies deny us the right to be honest when they force us to applaud what we detest or reject what we secretly admire.

When Cubans parade, shouting slogans they don’t believe in, they are not honest. When they applaud the leader they abhor or laugh at the nonsense he spouts, they are not honest.

That simulation creates in us an uncomfortable psychological dissonance. When we sacrifice our honesty, when we renounce our internal consistency to avoid harm or obtain a privilege, we feel “dirty” and internally ashamed. Hypocrisy is a behavior that wounds the person who practices it and repels the person at whom it’s directed.

But there’s more. At some point in the evolutionary process, when human beings abandoned the rule of instinct and began to guide themselves by reason, they discovered the agonizing process of making decisions by constantly shuffling the prevailing moral values, material interests, and psychological impulses.

To make such decisions, it was necessary to become informed. Totalitarian violence tries to prevent people from becoming informed. Why become informed if all the decisions are made by the State and all the truths have already been discovered?

In Cuba, there are numerous police brigades whose task it is to remove parabolic antennas, find satellite phones, confiscate banned books, and deny Internet access to anyone who is minimally independent. I cannot think of a more wretched activity.

When Spanish socialist Fernando de los Ríos asked Lenin when he was going to institute a regime of freedoms in the fledgling Soviet Union, the Bolshevik answered with a question loaded with cynicism: “Freedom for what?”

The answer to that is manifold: freedom to investigate, to generate wealth, to seek happiness, to reaffirm the individual ego in a human tide, all of them tasks that depend on our ability to make decisions.

The history of the West is the history of societies that have progressively expanded the horizons of free people.

Gradually, they took away from the monarchs and the religious and economic oligarchies their exclusive powers to decide in the name of the whole. The poor and the foreigners attained their rights. The same happened with the races considered to be inferior, with the women, with the people who were alienated because of their sexual preferences. Slavery was finally eradicated.

It is possible to narrate the long, historical trek of human beings as the constant adventure of our species in the quest for a gradual increase in the number of people given the right to make their own decisions.

Sometimes, the exercise of that ability assumes heroic proportions. Some weeks ago, Cuban political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo decided to die of hunger and thirst to protest against the injustice and abuses of the dictatorship. All he had to defend his dignity as a human being was his life — and he gave it. To him, to his sad memory, with deep emotion, I dedicate these words.
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Ecuador has imported tens and tens of thousands of Cuban….slaves. They spy on you and all of us. This is not liberty in law. On May 3, 2010 Correa decreed that anyone trained as a doctor in Cuba is now waived in to practice, never mind that Cuban doctors are badly trained….slaves and not remotely competent to do anything much. The Cubans now have fake professional cover- like fake passports and fake job security to….spy even more on all of us. Why is this happening? Is it that Ecuadoreans are so busy manipulating their own small lives that they care nothing that Correa is manipulating a whole nation? What we do know is that the day when the majority of Ecuadoreans cease playing games with honor and stop manipulating all around them is the day that Correa and his cartel cease to control because, as we all know, Correa has no power over persons who are not addicted to manipulating life and persons who hold honor. Who are you afraid of?

Carlos Alberto writes, “Freedom is fearlessly offering our affection and loyalty to the people we love, or to the groups with which we feel a kinship.”  Ecuadoreans who are addicted to manipulative living are never free to really love because they are chained to their addiction to manipulate while there is no room, no space for real love. Fake love may look good on the outside but it is still….fake. As Ronald Reagan noted, the reason there is no rule of law is because men refused the role of God as the basis for rule of law. “"Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged." ~ Ronald Reagan”

 If your acknowledgement in a higher being is so shallow, religion is replaced by cult like actors- not a vibrant religious structure and your rule of law will be shallow and easily removed and destroyed, leaving all in chaos, as is the case today in Ecuador where the state religion of the creepy fat perverted fake cult goddess Pachamama is the state religion of  manipulative duplicity and rule of law has been banished under Correa’s fake government.

Manipulative Ecuadoreans never love well nor deeply. Their affection is only for their selfish, shallow and adolescent self. They are full of fear that one day someone might figure this out. Looks like Carlos Alberto has outed their scary little problem, now a national disgrace. The majority who do not love God first nor credit God’s gift of liberty will never have freedom. Those who do not love fearlessly do not love well and certainly love less. Those who cannot love will always suck off the hard work of others like a tourist. Those who cannot love fearlessly will never lead fearlessly nor inspire one single thing. Ecuadoreans need fearlessly courageous lovers of all things…..mostly freedom. What do you love? We think that loving manipulatively leaves many souls desiring that fearless love which brings affection and loyalty which never changes with the occupant of Carondelet. Real love forms an invisible circle of fearlessness which Correa cannot track for a million miles. If you want to win, retrain your self and love fearlessly to live with liberty. If you want freedom, live with vibrant religion- not cults of manipulation small and large and serve with rule of law under God.

-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis