Monthly Archives: July 2021

Where Are The Insurance Companies?

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…you know, the huge trillion-dollar octopus that runs our health care system as a vast casino? The shaming ones, always brandishing actuarial tables and beating Americans up on things like “risk factors” and “risky Zip Codes” and “moral hazard” and “pre-existing conditions” and “acts of God,” and backing it up with tables of rates that quickly skyrocket if you, say, smoke, or eat fatty foods, or don’t belong to a gym, or have an accident while not wearing your glasses, or live in Watts or West Hollywood or South of Market, or have a sudden health emergency from inhaling fumes not AT work exactly, but out in the parking lot at 5:15. These insurance geeks are the medical geniuses who decided that, if a policyholder is prudent and asks the doctor to test for certain chronic diseases, or needs certain tests regularly, he will get summarily dropped from the plan. A hundred thousand things we can’t do in modern society, or are afraid to do, are too poor to do, because the insurance companies don’t like it or won’t allow it.

But if you are an American who chooses not to mask, not to social distance, or refuses to get a Covid-19 vaccine? They’re just fine with that. They’ve got you covered — and apparently are okay with everyone else in your community getting infected! They won’t raise your premiums or cancel your policy or make you do regular testing, or insist on a robust quarantine to try to protect the community. Big Insurance honors your guts and your freedom. So far, no super-spreader yahoo or casual moron has been told his activities are shamefully reckless and expensively idiotic. None of the thousand stories of selfishly insane behavior, of feckless, entitled narcissism, of unhinged melt-downs in the Trader Joe’s line, have resulted in a letter of cancellation, nor a single penny being added to anybody’s monthly premium.

IT MAKES YOU THINK.
President Biden of Delaware is the grandfather, or should I say The Godfather, of America’s whole medical insurance racket, and the engineer of the whole ACA. Since Covid-19 hit, insurers have maintained complete silence about “how they’re going to pay for all this,” as they’re always asking progressives when we bring up Universal Care. With every hospital in America burning fast and bright for a year and a half, and staff cut to the bone by disease and burnout, the medical industry’s Wall Street prices have only soared. It seems Pres. Biden has simply reassured them that the coffers of the U.S. treasury are open to them any time they like, day or night, here’s a key to the back door, take what you need. Insurers have expressed no fear of picking up the increasingly astonishing tab for the trillions of dollars the epidemic is obviously costing. Are insurers just happily absorbing people’s hospital bills? I doubt millions of sick families across America are able to just shrug off high deductibles, or write a 30,000 check for everyone in the family who gets sick.

If the insurers are paying people’s bills, that’s good and all right. And if the government is offering them a blank check, that might even be okay at this point. But a potent tool for stopping the disease is being ignored, and that’s NOT okay, especially given the insurers’ traditional greed and recent meanness. The greatest and most obvious examples of moral hazard in history are Covid-denial and vaccine resistance. If we were a moral nation, and conservatives really cared about “personal responsibility,” or really wanted to use the “Free Hand of the Market” to solve a problem, then why shouldn’t stupid anti-social schmucks be getting their insurance policies cancelled, or rates reassessed, to accurately “cover their risk,” as we‘ve heard all our lives is imperative?

A Zoo View

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  • All clear!
  • A Tadjik markhor — magnificent.
  • Black bear. So sweet.
  • Stag horn fern for the ages
Doesn’t everybody have zoo shots like this? This is a black mountain tapir, a splendid animal they say. I suppose its complete invisibility in the shade is a valuable survival trait.
  • Breathtaking saurus cranes: Antigone antigone. They’re almost as tall as I.
  • Proudly brooding TWO eggs!
  • The sea eagle. Awesome and powerful. Of all creatures, surely it is meant for “wide open spaces.” Those wings, those talons! But the LA Zoo is, alas, this corsair’s St. Helena — and don’t he appear to know it.

The Greek In Griffith Park

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Malosma laurina, laurel sumac

A keystone species in the ecology of the Santa Monica Mountains; it puts the Laurel into Laurel Canyon. Not really a laurel of course; but a sumac. (‘Early Settlers’ thought the leaves looked like European bay laurel (Laurus nobilis, Apollo’s bay, the leafed-crown-of-Fame. This seeing of bays everywhere was a trend…as we’ll see later.)

Peritoma arborea… the bladderpod. An Aristotelian freak, a kink in the Great Chain of Being, a living koan, Stoic philosophy in a shrub. I’ve read online, that the bladders make a spicy, crunchy snack, but you’ve got to first get past the offensive, orduriferous scent of the leaves to collect them. Consider that irony; you’ll go mad if you do, be tortured if you don’t.

  • CONSIDER THE BLADDERPOD
  • All that there is to know, the bladderpod knows.
  • Only consider, and you’ll know all the bladderpod knows, too.

The middle canyon (above Fern Dell, below the Observatory) is dominated by an olive grove. I’m almost certain the gnarled trunks and gray-green leaves signify Olea europaea — the gift of Athena to the polis of Athens on the day of its founding:

(The new citizens of Athens got to choose who would be their chief patron god. The field included all the local favorites, but in late polling it was neck-and-neck between Athena and Poseidon. To curry citizens’ favor, the Sea-god’s gambit was a violent earthquake that sent a hot salt-spring geyser gushing up through the Acropolis rock, running through the city and foaming through the agora. You could hear one hand clapping after this spectacle performance. Then Wisdom upstaged Poseidon completely by merely extending her bare arm, and offering the olive tree, which took root right there in the cleft rock. Critics raved, civilization ran, and word-of-mouth was great.) I have no idea why a grove of olives (wilsonii fruitless, I hope?) should prevail here, but maybe it was planted to offset the parchitecture for postcards. (Or they might be invasives…beware of Greeks bearing gifts. Maybe they’re Russian olives..I don’t think they’re Mission olive descendants.) Anyway, the grove is cool and lovely and thought-provoking to be under, and half-way hikers will be glad of the shade.

We have Plato to thank for the simple idea that God is perfect, and what is perfect is God, and nothing we see or do here on Earth is perfect, since we are not God, but we may glimpse intimations of perfection in nature and understand we must be in the presence of the divine, and are then capable of being invited to imagine the Ideal World of Forms just beyond the grasp of our physical senses. But if we can’t glimpse such perfection, and aren’t able to image the infinity of God’s Ideal Forms, we can still imagine that we can imagine perfection, from seeing things that aren’t perfect but maybe just awfully pretty — and hope and grace will do the saving rest. That’s the idea, anyway: add water and olive oil and it makes Western Civ. This graceful specimen is close to the Ideal Form of the lemonade berry tree. It is the Heddy Lamar of all the lemonade berry trees, balanced, tapered, stacked. Bright green leaves, vigorous growth. This is the kind of ideally beautiful lemonade tree, that fills the other lemonade berry trees with self-loathing and despair, and leaves them feeling stunted and hemmed-in and mis-shapen and cheated by life and doomed to hell, for sure.
Rhus integrifolia, the lemonade berry, from which berries in winter, a sweet-tart drink can be pressed.

THE STAR OF THE OBLONG THICKET

Patient Reader, recall that oblong thickets are good structures to look at, to spot rare chaparral plants. Here’s one such thicket just off the trail — and by gum there’s a Nevins barberry gesticulating proudly at the uphill end (and maybe another peeking out the back)! One of the rarest plants on earth, this example was not noted on the Griffith Park specimen map. This whole park, this gift of Griffith, this grant to Los Feliz, this Tongva glade, this wee bit hill and glen, just happens to hold the preponderant remaining world community of this dazzler of the CFP.

THE SPICY SCENT OF A BAY GROVE — Another CFP plant reminded California immigrants of Apollo’s noble bay tree, so they called it California bay. This magnificent tree is a bit similar to the European laurel, but it is completely unrelated. What is most remarkable is that this tree, by convergent evolution, exudes that heady bay fragrance, just like culinary bay, from oils in the leaves. Just like a grove of laurel in a Roman garden, Umbellularia californica perfumes the area under its canopy with divine scent.

“INSPIRING QUOTE HERE”: Col. Griffith J. Griffith made some inspiring statements when he donated the land for the park. He argued eloquently for the education of the masses in natural history, and uplift!, and progress, and trusting to nature’s regenerative powers. I know the quotes, but not verbatim. I blogged about them years ago, but couldn’t retrieve that article from my own blog. I may have reluctantly deleted the post when I temporarily ran out of space. Anyway now, those quotes, common coin for conservationists and reproduced in print and on bronze and terracotta plaques for 100 years, no longer exist. So I can’t document and illuminate for you, in his words, how much Griffith admired the Greeks and their democracy, and stressed common equality of access to nature and the good things of the polis. But I found out today we can no longer cut-and-copy blocks of text; you have to transcribe the whole text yourself from one screen to another, if you can even manage to hunt it down unedited and in one piece.

  • Fern Dell, the park’s prettiest grove, and a living museum.

Nor will Google bring up entries anymore for the old public domain books, histories or articles micro-fiched generations ago from moldering leather-bound tomes, which reproduced those remarks. Indeed, you won’t find any reference to a book or record that isn’t physically commercially in print by a major publisher and for sale (If the book’s for sale NOW on Amazon, Google will let you know it exists, but not let you see the text.) If nobody else has noticed what has suddenly and quietly happened, the View has. This is outrageous, this is Orwell; this is Himmler, this is the sack of the Alexandrian Library, this is rentierisme, this is the Dark Ages for man, this is the Inquisition, this is the final snuffing out of any hope for democracy. It is the Inquisition for our common knowledge, a permanent trap-door slide for our species down to eternal barbarism. If an individual fellow can not organize his own information, researching inexpensively and at his own pace and direction from the public sources bequeathed to us by Franklin and Jefferson and generations of scholars and dedicated public servants, but instead must crawl to the bot, taxed and tolled and kept ignorant of the richest sources, it is death for America. Here is the enclosure of the human mind; a kick in the head for public education, and the fatal blow to our common civic heritage. If this sticks (and some of Google’s outrageous ‘innovations’ mysteriously don’t), there’s almost no point going on from here. Sigh. With that, enjoy the the plants, they might not be here very long either.