Proud and prejudiced, or was Lot's wife the victim of a salt intensive diet?

It is a truth universally acknowledged here in the second decade of the twenty-first century that an unmarried middle-aged man without children and in possession of a good fortune must be in want of government mandated pediatric dental insurance.  Pediatric dental insurance is a marvelous thing; you can trace most of the world’s troubles these days to places where no one offers pediatric dental insurance, Brazilian bikini waxing, or daylight savings time as an energy saving measure; and having pediatric dental insurance will certainly ease many a concerned parent’s mind when little Janie or Johnny needs their first root canal at age four because they’ve gorged themselves on sugar and spice and everything nice to the point where their milk teeth have rotted away, but why an unmarried man without children and in possession of a good fortune would need the ease of mind conferred by having government mandated pediatric dental insurance is a little hard to understand, unless, of course, the purpose of requiring an unmarried middle-aged man without children and in possession of a good fortune to buy government mandated pediatric dental insurance is to separate the unmarried middle-aged man without children and in possession of a good fortune from as much of that good fortune as the government can get away with and still leave the  thoroughly plucked chicken enough to live on until they return to pluck him again next year. 

Similarly hard to explain these days is why a woman past her childbearing years would need to have insurance to cover the costs of her maternity leave.  This would appear, at first glance, to be something of a nonstarter, but I hear from those who know more about such things than I do that it does makes perfect sense. After all, as we see in the Book of Genesis, Sarah conceived Isaac when she was in her eighties or nineties, just as the angels said she would just before they moseyed off to blast Sodom, Gomorrah, and the rest of the cities of the plain from the face of the earth.  So if fertility was possible then, albeit with supernatural assistance, how much easier will it be in our scientific age for great-grandmothers to conceive and therefore need the access to the mandated maternity coverage, as well as the coverage needed to provide all the walkers, wheelchairs, and bassinets the new geriatric mom will need?  Clearly, the need is there, and being there, the government must meet the need, or better yet, have the mother to be meet the need. 

That the need is unlikely to the nth degree is neither here nor there; many things are unlikely, like Mariano Rivera blowing a save or my losing twenty pounds or the government requiring banks to loan money to people who can’t pay the loans back, but unlikelihood is scarcely a good reason for not doing what is right, necessary, and proper for the advancement of the common weal.  You could argue that such insurance is best paid by young people of childrearing age, but that would make you a racist or some other form of very bad person who doesn’t know what they are talking about.  Everyone knows that young people don’t have that kind of money these days, what with the economy being so anemic, the job opportunities in women’s holistic karma studies not as good as they used to be, and the weight of tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid student loans forcing our smartest young minds back into their parents’ basements to do what they do best: mope and bewail their fate on Twitter. There is an argument to be made here about whether requiring young people to buy overpriced government mandated health insurance when they don’t have any money to buy that insurance in the first place was such a smart idea, especially since, if I am to believe what I read in the press, the foundational idea of the former junior senator from Illinois’ reworking of the American health care system was that the young and healthy would be paying more in order to subsidize the older and sicker, who would pay less, thereby inverting the usual order of the insurance universe. I am sure this must be incorrect, as must be the reports that children, if that is the proper word, can stay on their parents’ insurance plan until they are twenty-six, since this would mean that young adults would simultaneously have to pay and not have to pay for their government-mandated health insurance.  Since both options cannot be true, I think it safe to say that neither is true, because the best and the brightest minds of this our Great Republic couldn’t be that dumb…

I do wonder, however, simply as an aside here, whether or not Lot was able to collect on his wife’s life insurance or if the insurance company, hewing to the strict terms of the contract, refused to pay, pointing out to the new widower and his now suspiciously pregnant daughters that the late Mrs. Lot was, first, responsible for her own demise; she did, after all, look back at Sodom after Lot specifically told her not to; and second, that her transformation into a pillar of salt is a classic example of that category of events known as Acts of God, said acts being uninsurable and therefore not covered by anyone’s plan, government mandated or not. It’s always important to read the fine print in any insurance plan: you can never tell what mischief the lawyers are hiding in there until you look for yourself

GOVERNMENT CARS: I haven’t been keeping up with the news recently; some things are just too depressing for words and I’ve been trying to shift from my usual diet of negativity to something with fewer carbohydrates and more good cholesterol; so I’ve been missing things as they go zipping by, and one of the things that I’ve apparently missed is the United States government guaranteeing the warranties of the Big Three automakers. This was news to me, and apparently it was news to me about three weeks after it was news to everyone else here in this our Great Republic. Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I should point out that my car is nine years old and that I finished making payments on it four or five years ago, so I am pretty sure that the warranty on my car ran out a while ago and that President Obama’s guarantee does not effect me in any way, which means that I am now officially easy meat for Lennie, my trusty and extremely expensive auto mechanic and a man whose kids my car has put through college at least twice. Having said that, I would think that people whose cars are still under warranty would start to worry right about now. At first glance, the idea that the full faith and credit of the United States government backs your car warranty should ease the fears of anyone with a warrantied car, but should reflection set in, and reflection almost always sets in like your brother in law from New Jersey parking his fat ass in your favorite chair after Thanksgiving dinner, troubles innumerable begin to spring up. I hesitate to point this out, a grammatical construction I’ve never really understood, since what usually follows after you say that you hesitate to point this out is the very thing you say you are hesitating to point out, but the same government that says it will guarantee your warranty is the same government that cannot successfully run a railroad, deliver your mail, or patrol its own borders. This, you’ll pardon me for saying so, does not inspire confidence in the long-term security of your warranty. So if you do have a government-backed auto warranty, you might want to start thinking about trading your car in for a Japanese or German car. If you are ecologically minded and concerned that getting a new foreign car may add to your carbon imprint, then now is a good time to think about buying a bicycle, or maybe a horse, although parking for the latter may be a bit hard to come by these days. And remember, if the government wants to guarantee the warranty on your horse, you might as well shoot it right now; five will get you ten the horse will be lame by the end of the year. And don’t forget to recycle the shoes.

NEBRASKA VS. GOD (2008): You can’t, much as you may want to, sue God, something I am sure the Lord in His infinite wisdom is almighty glad to hear. This bit of Good News comes to us all courtesy of a Nebraska judge, who tossed out said bit of legal silliness filed by an Omaha legislator who wanted God to pay up for all the trouble, terror, and other not nice things done either by Him directly or by others in His name. The judge, obviously a man of Solomonic wisdom, dismissed the case with prejudice, stating that since God had no address, the court could not serve Him with the papers necessary to inform Him that someone had filed suit against Him. Friends of the legislator, who must have a very safe seat or has decided to end his political career in spectacular if very silly fashion, countered the court’s legal reasoning, calling it specious in the extreme, pointing out that as the Lord is both ubiquitous and omniscient He has no need for a fixed address and already knows about the lawsuit without needing a process server to inform Him of that fact. Nevertheless, the wheels of justice, being essentially bureaucratic in their nature, dictate that the process server must serve the defendant, whether that defendant is the dumbass who ran his car straight into your garage door after a St. Patrick’s Day party or the Supreme Being. The state, after all, is paying the process server to serve legal paper and the state expects the process server to do something for the money, unlike, for example, the state’s expectations for the people at the department of motor vehicles, which is the bureaucratic equivalent of the island of lost souls and from whom nothing is expected except a prolonged case of agita,

Still, an appeal seems likely at this point as trial lawyers and insurance companies begin to square off for what promises to be the steel cage legal death match of the eternity. The financial stakes for the insurance companies could not be higher. For as long as there has been an insurance industry, there have been those events that we all know as acts of God, events so rare and so unlikely that that no one in their right mind, a classification that immediately eliminates most lawyers and all Red Sox fans, would expect an insurance company to write a policy on. Everyone understands that no insurance company has ever calculated your chances of having your pancreas ripped from your body and eaten raw by a gray-bearded schlirchher bird-fungus from the planet Grokklesnorp as you head off to your nearest Dunkin Donuts for your morning cup of coffee. This is just something that does not appear on any actuarial chart that I am aware of and, as far as the insurance company is concerned, not an event that they can assign a dollar amount to. Should this admittedly unlikely event occur to you or to someone you love, it would be one of those acts traditionally ascribed to the Almighty, like earthquakes, avalanches, and that little old lady who doesn’t bother to check for oncoming traffic as she makes a left turn onto a major highway, which I know is definitely an act of God from the way I screamed, Jesus Christ! I am sure if you are not a Christian you would have used the name of your conception of the Divine in vain as well. If God suddenly becomes liable for the acts traditionally ascribed to Him and the workings of His Divine Will, many insurance companies will go through the legal boilerplate on all of their contracts to make sure that none of these acts require them to part with so much as a red cent. Worse even than this, insurance industry lobbyists are already hard at work in Washington, trying to make sure that Congress does not pass legislation requiring the Almighty to take out some insurance if He wishes to continue going about His mysterious ways His wonders to perform. Wonders are all very well and good for your average insurance company, so long as they are not on the hook for the damages.

Trial lawyers, by contrast, regard the Lord and all His works as the biggest potential payday since the invention of asbestos, an event that any good lawyer will have no trouble connecting with the Almighty. Indeed, there will scarcely be a major or minor disaster anywhere in the world that the trial lawyers will not try to pin on the Lord. And given that the Lord is eternal, the number of billable hours a smart lawyer can generate will be truly astounding. Had the option been available to them, the wrongful death class action suit for the citizens of Pompeii killed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. would still be winding its way through the courts, with the descendants of the original lawyers still getting rich off the case. Yes indeed, there’s nothing like a volcanically active planet with no written warning sign stating that living on this planet might be hazardous to your health to set any personal injury lawyer’s eyes aglow with a selfless desire to help the insulted and injured of this earth, and, of course, to make out like a bandit without any of the attendant risks.