Tim Appnel writes about the closing of the Elizabeth Seton Childbearing Center in Manhattan.

It was started 30 years ago and was the first in the US and is the only out of hospital birth center of its kind in NYC. (It shouldn’t be the only one, but it is.) They are being forced to close September 1st. Their current malpractice insurer refused to renew their policy with 6 weeks left on their policy and the best quote any other would give would be a 250% plus increase, into the millions annually, for 1/6th the coverage they used to have. They simply cannot operate under those terms — they are a not-for-profit organization with 30% of patients on medicaid.

…They aren’t going out with a whimper and are organizing various forms activism to bring this situation to light while trying to help patients make alternate arrangements. They want to keep these type of healthcare options available to women and their families. I’ve helped them setup a weblog to communicate to their patients and the public …

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You too can host your own radio talk show! That, anyway, is the conclusion I reached after my interview with VoiceAmerica.com, “The Leader in Internet-Live Talk Radio.”

Two days ago, I got a message on my answering machine asking me if I’d be interested in hosting a talk show on “marketing and business.” A little broad and not exactly what I’d present as my area of special expertise, but apparently talk shows on dimly remembered philosophy courses and why Bush is a stinky liar just aren’t in demand. So I called the guy back. What the hell. The receptionist informed me that the guy who called is actually the personal assistant to the executive producer. She wasn’t in either. So I called back the next day and was told the guy is the personal assistant to another executive producer. In fact, he’s the close personal assistant to all the executive producers.

Today’s exec producer got on the phone and told me, in a stream into which a word could not be fitted edgewise, that he’s willing to invest $20K-30K in giving me a weekly show. I get to pick my guests and topics. He handles the marketing and sales of advertising. Of course, I do have to make a little investment of $300/week for 12 weeks, but it’s really just to keep me honest. The producer makes no promises that the show will succeeed, although his personal retention rate is 78%.

Do they have audited survey figures, I ask? Now now, that wouldn’t be fair, he replies. I might look at the figures for a show like George Lucas’ educational series and think that I’ll get numbers like that. So, no, I can’t see any figures. But, I say, I’m not that stupid; I just want to get a sense of what counts as success. No, says the producer, that might mislead me.

How did they hear about me, I ask. Apparently, they’re always on the lookout for talented people with fresh points of view. They monitor the Web, look at published articles, try to keep their ear to the ground. In other words, he’s never heard of me.

I’m sure my turning down the offer was a huge disappointment to VoiceAmerica. Believe me, I felt bad about leaving them with a gaping hole in their schedule. So, I’ll be happy to pass your name along to them. For a fee, of course.

I’m just trying to keep you honest.

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Several people have noticed an uptick in spam that includes strings of words unrelated to the topic of the spam or to one another, apparently in an attempt to fool Bayesian spam filters into thinking they’re legitimate. (Popfile is nonetheless capturing most of them.)

I don’t have any idea what program these randospamos are using, but there are plenty of generators that go opposite the way, putting together words that (based on a particular corpus) are likely to go together. See Fun with Markov Chains where you’ll find Alice in Elsinore, gibberish generated by intersecting Hamlet and Alice in Wonderland.

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With Charles Taylor out of office, it hasn’t taken long for the Liberian version of the Nigerian scam to surface in my inbox:

I am Mr. Jonson Tubman, former Special Assistant to the Liberian President, Mr. Charles Taylor, who just stepped down from the office of the President due to rebel’s insurgency who wants to overthrow his government. President Charles Taylor, in his bid to fend-off rebel insurgency, and since he could no longer trust the army generals, confidentially put in my care, the sum of $18,000,000.00 (eighteen million United States dollars) in one instance for the purpose of purchasing arms and ammunitions should the need arise…

You know, that Mr. Tubman sounds awfully sincere. I might as well send him all my banking information…

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Chip sends us to a page with a running counter toting up the cost of the war in Iraq, based on figures from the Congressional Budget Office. It also lets you choose form a list of US towns to see how much it’s costing viewed locally. Sure, the page is a gimmick, but it’s a useful one, helping us to get our heads around some 8-figure numbers.

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Jeff Angus, who has written about tech and business for just about everyone, has started a blog called Management by Baseball on a topic suitably off-beat: The lessons business can learn from baseball. His thesis is that:

Everything You Need to Know About Management You Can Learn From Baseball. It applies lessons I learned as a baseball reporter and management consultant. The work takes those lessons and shows how people can become better managers in any kind of organization by applying lessons learned from the National Pastime.

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We had the archetypal used car experiences yesterday shopping for a commuter auto for our college-bound daughter.

We went first to Cypress Auto in Brookline because they sponsor lots of community events and groups. Also, my wife’s brother has done business with them. Also, when they petitioned the zoning board for permission to expand, their neighbors testified on their behalf. And we were treated great. It’s a small lot — about 20 cars — with the prices in plain view. They took our car to the adjoining service station they own and told us that they’d give us $4,000 for our 1997 Dodge Caravan (40,000 miles) because of the huge, metal-grinding lip a bike rack created at the top of the the back access door. (Cars.com says the trade-in value is probably around $3,300. Edmunds‘ more thorough form pegs it at $5,100, but neither place has seen just how bad our back door is.)

Then we went to a local Dodge store. Huge parking lot of cars. Icycle-forming AC in the showroom. They offered us a free drink, but the lost all interest when we said that we wouldn’t actually be buying then and there. Not only were there no prices on any car, but the salesperson wouldn’t tell us any prices. He wouldn’t tell us the trade-in value of our car until we’re ready to buy. And after showing us the first used car, he said that for our daughter’s safety and peace of mind, we really should buy her a new Kia, starting at $12,000. After all, we wouldn’t want her stuck on a road in a year when something breaks. “So, you think this used car has a lifetime of about a year before it starts to break?” I said. “Oh, no no. This car has many miles left in it…” Shall I even mention that when the salesguy said that one particular car had A/C even though it wasn’t listed on the manifest, but when we checked we found the manifest was right?

I know that the salesguy at Cypress could be faking it. I’ve been fooled before and I will be again. But I feel like I have enough independent indicators to trust him at least somewhat, whereas the Dodge guy might as well have been wearing a plaid suit and smoking a cheap cigar.

Comments about how I am going wrong in this process would be appreciated…

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Good news in the continuing the Linux installation saga: I’m now using my Linux box as a tunes server. Well, actually, all I’ve done is move my mp3s onto it and am playing them through xmms.

The slightly impressive bit is that Mandrake’s samba recognized the mini-drive I have plugged into a USB port on my XP laptop, so I’m now copying 10 gigabytes of MP3s over to the linux machine. Plus, Mandrake’s xmms actually plays mp3’s, unlike RedHat’s that was scared off by patent uncertainties.

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Scott Rosenberg has written an excellent appreciation of J.S. Mill’s On Liberty. (It requires a Salon premium membership or the willingness to sit through an ad.) Scott contextualizes Mill brilliantly, getting past the standard “take-away” that one person’s liberty ends only where another’s begins. He writes:

The opposing force that elicited Mill’s redefinition of liberty was nothing so old-fashioned as an oppressive king. Nor were encroachments on freedom of the press his concern… Mill’s eloquence on behalf of liberty was inspired by what he saw as a deadening sameness of opinion infecting his contemporaries. He looked around at mid-century England and saw it filled with “conformers to commonplace, or timeservers for truth.” His fellow citizens had become containers of received wisdom, receptacles of “dead dogma.”

The antidote to such stagnation, he maintained, was not simply toleration of nonconformists but vigorous engagement with “heretical positions”…

I love On Liberty – although I officially haven’t read it in a Long Time – because of its elegant radical reframing of the question of rights. Rather than being legislated by kings, God or nature, they are simply the default and their limits are defined operationally: how long is your arm and where exactly is my nose?

But I don’t share Mill’s optimism about rationality. If we were entirely rational creatures, disengaged from our own opinions and committed only to an abstract truth, then every day we could have deep conversations with positions we are convinced are thoroughly wrong. But, we are rooted in our times, in our culture, in our psychology, in our interests, in our voice, in our bodies. We cannot escape those roots to have lofty, toga-clad discussions in which all points of view are welcomed and considered equally.

Scott’s essay is subtler than I’m being about this. He reminds us that Mill understood that “every era must accept the inevitability of being revised, corrected and judged by those who come after.” Nevertheless, Mill has always struck me, in his views on liberty as well as his utilitarianism’s calm calculus of interests, as being overly rationalistic in his proposed methodologies, even while repudiating authority and legislated principle.

Scott ends by pointing to the Internet as “the vastest marketplace of ideas that mankind has yet managed to create,” an “unbounded and still growing embodiment of Mill’s ideals.” Lovely point, yet I think Mill would also find the Net vastly disappointing because of its frequent lack of reason and the commonplace of “echo chambers” that exclude views that are one degree to the left or right.

But we should not be disappointed, IMO. Yeah, sure there are appallingly stupid and nasty arguments and gangs that exist simply to think the same thought over and over and over. We are all guilty of this. I certainly am. Now, we could be elitists about this. Mill was, as Scott points out. Heidegger, with his criticism of the inauthentic jibber-jabber of mass man (das Mann), was. But, hell, if history’s taught us one thing it’s that we’re the jibber-jabbering animals. There’s no escaping it; there’s just better or worse, more or less. The fray of bad ideas passionately expressed and commonplace ideas intersecting at impossible angles is our condition, and it’s been made grand by the Internet.

Fittingly, while checking the spelling of “das Mann,” I came across a lively debate over Heidegger’s Nazism.

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I’ve been trying out Bloglines, an on-line, free aggregator. So far, it seems pretty good.

Unlike the other aggregators I’ve used, this one has no client software. You just got to their site and tell it which blogs you’d like to aggregate. Not a lot of options and preferences, but I’m pretty happy with its defaults. And for reasons I couldn’t really articulate, I seem to prefer to read my aggregated blogs in a browser than in a special client. But now we’re way down into the subrational.

Anyway, it seems to be worth a look…

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