insurance-companies

Insurance companies sell what might happen tomorrow. Historians sell what certainly happened yesterday.

Time travel? I believe there are people regularly travelling back from the future and interfering with our lives on a daily basis. The evidence is all around us. I__ talking about how every time we make an insurance claim we discover that somehow mysteriously the exact thing we__e claiming for is now precisely excluded from our policy.

One of the first things we teach medical students is to listen to the patient by taking a careful medical history. Ninety percent of the time, you can arrive at an uncannily accurate diagnosis by paying close attention, using physical examination and sophisticated lab test to confirm your hunch (and to increase the bill to the insurance company).

The insurance companies involved had all claimed that this was, by any reasonable standards, an act of God. But, Dirk had argued, which god? Britain was constitutionally a Christian monotheistic state, and therefore any __ct of God_ defined in a legal document must refer to the Anglican chap in the stained glass and not to some polytheistic thug from Norway.