Two Hundred Thirty Two Years Ago, Thomas Jefferson wrote the following:

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 of 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 shewn, 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.

And so the men of 1776 rebelled against King George III, citing as examples numerous examples of his usurpation of the rights of man. And, quite honestly, given the historical record and the example of dictators far worse than George III that history has produced, one might sometimes wonder if the colonials were overreacting. After all, it’s not as if King George had authorized usurped legal authority to conduct surveillance on his own citizens, or conducted a war based on false assumptions,� pardoned a close aide, taken property from one citizen and given it to another, or restricted people’s ability to earn a living in their chosen profession. Heck, when you look at the taxes that led the colonialists to rebel and compare them to what gets taken out of your paycheck every week, its hard to understand what they were so upset about.

Seriously, the lesson of 1776 isn’t so much that George III was a good guy, but that we’ve forgotten the warning of Thomas Jefferson that

[T]he price of liberty is eternal vigilence.

We’ve let freedom be eroded, little by little, to the point where the idea of the state being allowed to put surveillance cameras on street corners to “watch” us seems natural. We’ve let privacy become a charade to the point where the Social Security Number has in fact become the National ID that it’s advocates promised it never would become. We’ve let government involvement in the economy expand to the point where a trillion dollars in tax collections seems like a trivial amount.

We’ve become the frog in the slowly boiling pot of water.

The question, then, is when does it become enough ? When will the American people finally wake up and realize that their liberties are being eroded on a daily basis ? And, where are the heirs of Jefferson ?

After starting out on Blogger, I moved to a real server, and real blog software in April 2006, and, notwithstanding a very dry spell during September and October of last year, it’s been nothing but writing, writing, writing since then.

And people actually seem to be noticing. Through today, roughly 580,000 people have visited both the Blogger and Wordpress versions of the site and I’ve received links from several big-time bloggers, including a lot of traffic over the past year as the Presidential campaign has heated up.

But I don’t do this to watch the Sitemeter numbers rise, I do it because I enjoy writing and this seems to be a good way to keep my skills sharp. The fact that people notice is just icing on the cake.

Anyway, thanks for visiting and posting comments. And keep coming back.

And yes, the two week long mostly hiatus will be coming to an end soon.

First, all of the digitial channels we receive through our Comcast box were showing a distorted picture and distorted sound which made watching anything other than basic cable pretty much impossible for the past two weeks or so.

That was the first frustration, the second one came about because Comcast’s customer service problems herein in Northern Virginia.

Telephone calls to the local customer support desk were, to say the least, mostly worthless. On three different occasions, I was asked to unplug the cable box and allow it to reboot to see if that would fix the problem. Each time, it failed to have any impact on the issue at all.

Finally, we had a service appointment scheduled on Tuesday July 1st between 9 and 12. The night before, we’d even gotten a phone call from somone in tech support asking me to tell them yet again what our problem was even though I’d done so at least three times in the past two or three weeks — they even wanted me to reboot the cable box again, at 8:30 at night no less.

Anyway, 9am came and went without a visit or a phone call. 10am. 11am. Then, it was after noon and, as several of the Twitter messages I sent out that day show, I was getting annoyed (for some reason, Twitter’s time stamp is an hour behind when the post was actually sent):

Comcast supposed to be here between 9 and 12 today. They have 5 minutes left. What do you think will happen ? 10:55 AM July 01, 2008 from TwitterFox 

On hold with Comcast phone support. 5 minutes and counting on that. 4 minutes to go before the 9-12 window expires 10:57 AM July 01, 2008 from TwitterFox 

Well, it’s after noon and no Comcast. Color me surprised. 11:12 AM July 01, 2008 from TwitterFox 

Now, I’m waiting on a call from the Comcast dispatcher to explain why they missed the appt. And waiting. And Waiting. 11:20 AM July 01, 2008 from TwitterFox 

Needless to say, that call never came, and the frustration grew:

Maybe I should research Verizon FIOS while I’m waiting for Comcast to show up 11:20 AM July 01, 2008 from TwitterFox 

Considering how happy I was to drop the land line and get rid of Verizon a year or so ago, that’s saying alot.

By mid-afternoon nothing was happening and I was getting really annoyed:

Another 16 minutes on hold with Comcast in Manassas trying to figure out how they totally f**ked this day up 12:58 PM July 01, 2008 from TwitterFox 

Breaking News: Comcast sucks. In other news, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. 01:40 PM July 01, 2008 from web 

Fifth phone call with Comcast. Fifth different explanation for why nobody came today. 03:06 PM July 01, 2008 from TwitterFox 

At that point, I was told that the appointment had been canceled because, thanks to a missed phone call, the driver assumed that nobody was home even though I hadn’t left the house all day.

That’s about the time I received a Twitter message from @Comcastcares asking how they could help. It turns out it was a guy named Frank Eliason, who works with Comcast out of Philadelphia. Not only did we exchange several emails that afternoon, but, that evening, I spoke with Mr. Eliason and had secured an appointment for the next day, yesterday, after being told that the first available appointment was a week away.

So, by 10:30 yesterday morning, a technician had been to our house and the problem, which was due to a  weak signal coming into the house from the outside, had been fixed.

And the proactive response that Frank Eliason took deserves credit for that.

But if I hadn’t been the guy making the noise on Twitter to begin with, we’d be in the same boat as pretty much every other Comcast customer is in when a problem like this arises.

So there’s two lessons here.

One lesson is for Comcast, which needs to improve customer service, at least here in Northern Virginia, which is something that Mr. Eliason was candid enough to admit on the phone Tuesday night. It shouldn’t take two hours of posting bad news on Twitter for someone to get something done that should have been taken care of long before.

The other lesson, though, is for the rest of us; that old adage about the squeaky wheel getting the grease is still true. Companies don’t like bad publicity, and in the Web 2.0 world bad publicity can spread very fast and be very hard to counter. That’s why it’s smart for Eliason to monitor places like Twitter and respond proactively to problems like the one we had.

Finally, here’s an interesting article about Eliason and Comcast’s Twitter strategy:

Welcome to what might be called the Twitterverse of Frank Eliason, who, under the name comcastcares, has “tweeted” everything above, jumping onto Twitter like a virtual knight in shining armor.

Maybe you’ve read about him over the last few weeks. He’s the guy now appointed by Comcast to communicate with those who complain about their Comcast service on Twitter, and a day in his life is one filled with tweets issued by BlackBerries, RSS feeds that alert him to the latest Internet outage in Palo Alto, and sometimes being the canary in the Comcast coal mine. A recent problem in the Chicago area became immediately apparent to Eliason by monitoring Twitter, and he believes he knew about it before Comcast staff closer to the situation did. “I can take care of pretty much anything — and if I can’t, I’ll call someone who can,” he says. (If that sounds like a boast, in conversation Eliason is an extremely sincere guy.)

The fact that Eliason’s job even exists illustrates the serendipity required for most companies to get with the social networking program today. His emergence on Twitter is the result of his own long-held interest in tracking customer sentiment — along with a nudge from a Comcast executive a few months ago to check out what people were saying about the company on the micro-blogging service. Eliason just observed Twitter at first before tentatively wading in. But earlier this month, his dalliance with Twitter burst into the blogosphere, when he noticed a tweet from Michael Arrington, who runs the highly influential blog TechCrunch. Arrington was complaining that his Comcast Internet service was inexplicably down. Eliason reached out to help, and Comcast soon dispatched a team to Arrington’s house to fix his Internet connection. It was, Eliason says, a turning point, but not in quite the way you’d think. Sure, Arrington’s experience with Eliason turned into a lengthy post on TechCrunch, but what seems to have interested Eliason more is how his Twitter followers rallied around him when some said that Comcast had only helped Arrington because he was Arrington. No, his supporters said, he’d helped out many other people too. Comcastcares was forming relationships.

I’ll agree with that one completely. I’m not Michael Arrington and I certainly don’t have his influence, but Eliason still reached out and did what he could to make a bad situation much better.

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods.

Several Guantánamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed.

But committee investigators were not aware of the chart’s source in the half-century-old journal article, a connection pointed out to The New York Times by an independent expert on interrogation who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been “brainwashed,” and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies’ harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.

And 50 years later, we’re using Mao-era Chinese interrogation techniques.

Progress ? I don’t think so.

Your Result: Libertarian

This quiz has defined you as a Libertarian. Keep in mind, this ideology can be applied to the right or left in the social sense. You believe in a minimal role of the government in solving problems and believe that the “Free market” can handle almost all economic situations.

You can submit questions here.

But, the truth is, it seems, quite another story:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — An influential oil-policy group released a report Tuesday arguing that the increase in oil-market speculation is not driving up crude prices. But the study far from ends the debate.

Since 2003, the volume of investment funds in commodity markets - especially oil - rose from about $15 billion to $260 billion, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), which issued the report.

And many argue that all that extra money sloshing around is to blame for prices doubling from $71 last July to roughly $140 today.

The IEA isn’t buying it.

“There is little evidence that large investment flows into the futures market are causing an imbalance between supply and demand, and are therefore contributing to high oil prices,” the report said.

Instead, the IEA put the blame for higher crude prices squarely on strong growth in demand coupled with limited growth in supply.

“If supply is constrained and demand is increasing, prices have to rise,” read the report.

The IEA argues that if speculation drives prices too high, the market would be unbalanced. Either demand would fall off, or stockpiles would rise. Neither has happened.

In fact, global demand for oil products has surpassed supply in every quarter since the fourth quarter of 2006, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration

And thus, quite logically, the price has gone up.

Does this mean that the oil markets are a completely free market ? No, of course not.

There are plenty of distortions that exist, all of them created by government at one level or another. But, in the end, it’s the market that is determining the price we’re paying today, not some vast unseen conspiracy.