A Declaration; The Thirty-Five Words

Jefferson violin solo at 2:15.


See also [The 35 Words] project at [Thomas Jefferson Hour] for the 35 words in over forty languages and counting.

The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

• He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
• He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
• He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
• He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
• He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
• He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
• He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.
• He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.
• He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
• He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
• He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.
• He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.
• He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:
• For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
• For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:
• For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:
• For imposing taxes on us without our consent:
• For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:
• For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:
• For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:
• For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:
• For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
• He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.
• He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
• He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy of the head of a civilized nation.
• He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.
• He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence.They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levey war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

An argument for birth control

"Thanks to medical science, surgery and hygeine, we have reached an incredible peak of breeding success. We have practised death control and now we must balance it with birth control. It looks very much as though, during the next century or so, we are going to have to change our sexual ways at last. But if we do, it will not be because they failed, but because they succeeded too well...

We already know that if our populations go on increasing at their present terrifying rate, uncontrollable aggressiveness will become dramatically increased. This has been proved conclusively with laboratory experiments. Gross over-crowding will produce social stress and tensions that will shatter our community organizations long before it starves us to death... If a selective attempt is made to stem the breeding flood, with certain pairs permitted to breed freely and others prevented from doing so, then this will work against the essential cooperativeness of society--the pair-bonding pattern will suffer.

To sum up then, the best solution for ensuring world peace is the widespread promotion of contraception or abortion. Abortion is a drastic measure and can involve serious emotional disturbance... Contraception is obviously preferable, and and religious or other 'moralizing' factions that oppose it must face the fact that they are engaged in dangerous war-mongering."

-Desmond Morris, 1967 in The Naked Ape

Harry Chapin on his grandfather

"My grandfather was a painter. He died at age eighty-eight, he illustrated Robert Frost's first two books of poetry and he was looking at me and he said, 'Harry, there are two kinds of tired: there's good-tired, and there's bad-tired.' He said, 'Ironically enough, bad-tired can be a day that you won. But you won other people's battles, you lived other people's days, other peoples agendas, other people's dreams and when it was all over there was very little "you" in there, and when you hit the hay at night, somehow you toss and turn--you don't settle easy.' He said, 'Good-tired, ironically enough, can be a day that you lost. But you don't have to tell yourself, 'cause you knew you fought your battles, you chased your dreams, you lived your days, and when you hit the hay at night, you settle easy--you sleep the sleep of the just, and you can say "take me away."' He said, 'Harry, all my life I've painted. God, I would've loved to be more successful, but I painted and I painted, and I am good-tired and they can take me away.'

Now, if there is a process in your and my lives in the insecurity that we have about a prior life or an afterlife and God--I hope there is a God. If He is-- if He does exist He's got a rather weird sense of humor, however. But let's just-- But if there's a process that will allow us to live our days and will allow us that degree of equanimity towards the end, looking at that black, implaccable wall of death, to allow us that degree of peace, that degree of non-fear, I want in."

-Harry Chapin

On hips

"The strongly favoured androcentric theory is that the difference [between men and women] is an aesthetic improvement, and that it evolved as some sort of sexual stimulus.

This is essentially a circular argument. 'I find this attribute sexy: therefore it must have evolved in order that I might find it sexy.' It's like saying that a wman walks with a wiggle because this is attractive to a male. In fact, she only walks with a wiggle because her children are so intelligent. The necessity of passing a large-skulled infant's head through her pelvic ring has prevented her skeleton to adapting to bipedalism quite as gracefully as her brothers; and males only find this defect attractive because they associate it with femininity."

-Elaine Morgan, [The Descent of Woman]

What's in sexy?

"Professor Hardy explains the hair on our heads by saying that since only our heads remained above water, exposed to the sun, the hair remained to protect us from its rays. Other evolutionists, if they explain it at all, usually dump it on to the miscellaneous heap of unique human features labeled 'for sexual attraction'--a safe and lazy solution, since there are very few physical features which somebody at some time hasn't found sexually stimulating."

-Elaine Morgan, [The Descent of Woman]

The latter half of that is certainly true. She talks about a "vagueness of aim" in what humans find attractive in each other later in the book. "For sexual attraction" is also a good pigeonhole for some human attributes--especially in women--that on the surface makes sense but may have other evolutionary factors. An example from the text (hips) is in the queue for tomorrow.

This is a wonderful book but I wish I had read Descent of Man and The Naked Ape first for context. It was also originally published in 1972 so it has a lot of Vietnam and women's lib coloration--so it's interesting from a biological, cultural, and political standpoint.

On Female Orgasm

"First: If female orgasm was evolved in our species for the first time to provide the woman with a 'behavioural reward' for increased sexual activity, why in the name of Darwin has the job been so badly bungled that there have been whole tribes and whole generations of women hardly aware of its existence?"

-Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman

The Descent of Woman

"According to the Book of Genesis, God first created man. Woman was not only an afterthought, but an amenity. For close on two thousand years this holy scripture was believed to justify her subordination and explain her inferiority; for even as a copy she was not a very good copy. There were differences. She was not one of His best efforts.

There is a line in an old folk song that runs: 'I called my donkey a horse gone wonky.' Throughout most of the literature dealing with the differences between the sexes there runs a subtle underlying assumption that woman is a man gone wonky; that woman is a distorted version of the original blueprint; that they are the norm and we are the diviation.

It might have been expected that when Darwin came along and wrote an entirely different account of the Descent of Man, this assumption would have been eradicated, for Darwin didn't believe she was an afterthought: he believed her origin was at least contemporaneous with man's. It should have led to some kind of breakthrough in the relationship between the sexes. But it didn't.

Almost at once men set about the congenial and fascinating task of working out an entirely new set of reasons why woman was manifestly inferior and irreversibly subordinate, and they have been happily engaged on this ever since. Instead of theology they use biology, and ethology, and primatology, but they use it to reach the same conclusions.

They are now prepared to debate the most complex problems of economic reform not in terms of the will of God, but in terms of the sexual behaviour patterns of the cichlid fish; so that if a woman claims equal pay or the right to promotion there is usually an authoratative male thinker around to deliver a brief homily on hormones, and point out that what she secretly intends by this, and what will inevitably result, is the 'psychological castration' of the men in her life."

-Elaine Morgan, [The Descent of Woman]: The Classic Study of Evolution. From Chapter One.

Natural habitats

"The currency of Haiti, by the way, is based on the American dollar. Whatever an American dollar is worth, that is what a Haitian dollar is worth, and actual American dollars are in good circulation. There seems to be no scheme in Haiti, however, for retiring worn-out dollar bills, and replacing them with new ones. So it is ordinary there to treat with utmost seriousness a dollar which is as insubstantial as a cigarette paper, and which has shrunk to the size of an airmail stamp.

"I found one such bill in my wallet when I got hrom from Haiti a couple of years ago, and I mailed it back to Al and Sue Seitz, the owners and host and hostess of the Oloffson [Hotel], asking them to release it into its natural habitat. It could not have survived a day in New York City."

-Kurt Vonnegut, in the introduction to Deadeye Dick

Does he count?

"Therefore, my beloved, avoid idolatry" (NAB).

The "Seven Sisters" of the North American Wildlife Conservation Model

1. The Public Trust
In North America, natural resources on public lands are managed by government agencies to ensure that we always have wildlife and wild places to enjoy.

2. Prohibition on Commerce of Dead Wildlife
Conservation laws and their strong enforcement in the United States and Canada saved wildlife from slaughter.

3. Democratic Rule of Law
You can help make laws to regulate hunting and fishing and conserve wildlife.

4. Hunting Opportunity for All
Every citizen has an opportunity, under the law, to hunt and fish in the United States and Canada.

5. Non-frivolous Use
In North America, we can legally kill certain wild animals under strict guidelines for food and fur, self-defense and property protection.

6. International Resources
Wildlife and fish migrate freely across boundaries between states, provinces and countries.

7. Scientific Management
The right information helps us make good decisions and become better stewards of wildlife.

Anyone can plant a garden, even if you only have one pot

"There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.

To avoid the first danger, one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue.

To avoid the second, he should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside."

-Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949)