Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton were bitter enemies for much of their careers, and I generally side with Hamilton.  I could catalog many Jeffersonian faults, and rather think him to be a jerk, but oh, that Declaration.  He earned a lot of good will with that.

Our rights as human beings do not come from the government.  They exist apart from any government, and we are entitled to them because our Creator gave them to us.  No government can properly take them away or seek to define or limit them in any way.  All a government can do is either help to protect, or conversely infringe upon, those rights.  The goal in organizing a government is to align our imperfect natures with the structure of governing institutions in such a way that the government protects those rights. Often the best we can hope for is that the government stays out of our way.

If you disagree with the above, you disagree with both Jefferson and Hamilton, and most of the people who formed our country between roughly July 4, 1776 and 1820.  In those decades, they separated from England, formed a new government, scrapped it, formed another new government unlike any other that ever existed, and began operating under that system in such a way that demonstrated it could work.  With respect to their biggest failing, they at least created a system such that the seeds of its demise were sown from the beginning.  No country built on the foundation of natural law and rights could sustain the institution of slavery indefinitely.  We are in their debt today.

Happy Birthday America.

The Photograph

This is Independence Hall in Philadelphia, of course, where both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were born. This is not HDR, but created from a single exposure from a set of brackets. I think it was the -1 exposure. As I have previously mentioned, if you have the equipment that makes shooting multiple brackets easy, you might as well shoot them, because the best image to work with might be slightly over or under exposed from neutral. If I had the chance to go back I would probably adjust the composition. In particular I would like to get the flag off the extreme edge of the image. There wouldn’t really be much loss with less of the tree and planter on the right. It’s a bit of a shame. My path that morning took me by this location as almost my first interesting subject. It was quite early, and I was clearly a little groggy. Looking through the set of images I took that day, I can see a clear improvement in quality that came about 20 minutes after I took this one, and that lasted the rest of the morning.

Finally, the non-photo related text above is exactly what I wrote in my Independence Day post 2 years ago, only slightly edited for style and clarity. The post title is also the same. It is also something of a 4th of July tradition for me to post a video of the following song. In this version, I love how Bernstein conducts the piccolos with his eyebrows.