Oh, I understand that there is nearly always someone willing to sell insurance.

In California, law protecting people who live in mobile home parks allows for them to collect attorneys fees in they prevail. Sounds nice, but the result is that there is a cottage industry for firms to sue mobile home parks for 'failure to maintain' and then churn fees. There are always allegations of property damage to trigger CGL coverage, so the park's insurance ends up picking up the tab, including those attorneys fees. Plus, the attorneys fees are covered under Supplemental Payments, which aren't limited to the policy limits. Between the defense fees and settlement (which includes plaintiffs' attorneys fees), an insurer can easy incur a million or more in liability. And yet there are insurers out there writing these policy charging, say, $10k, in premiums. One insured hit with a failure to maintain suit can wipe out profits from a hundred policies! (Luckily, as an attorney, I get to make money off the misery of others.)

My clients have included both admitted and nonadmitted carriers, and I know that CDS aren't regulated like insurance. I even sort of know how the London market works. I'm assuming you aren't defending AIG's stupidity, but I really can't tell. I mean, a huge part of the problem is that, unlike insurance which, wisely, is regulated, the CDS market wasn't regulated.

As to your comments re: supplemental payments, do you really think that insurers aren't aware of the risk of rejecting an at or below policy limits demand? Here in California, we have a continuous trigger of coverage, so multiple policies can be triggered by one complaint if the complaint alleges continuous and progressive damages. If the insurer has two years of coverage (and multiple years are common) and a weak Montrose-type exclusion, the insurer could potentially have to settle for $2M, the occurrence limit for each year. Or, they can go to trial, lose (because, let's face it, mobile home parks usually aren't that nice to live in) and get stuck with an even bigger bill -- covered property damage, plus supplemental payments resulting from all that fee churning, plus the defense fees which skyrocket during trial. Just because you only have to pay plaintiffs' attorneys fees as 'costs taxed' if you lose doesn't mean you can just be blind to the potential liability. That's why most cases get settled rather than go to trial.

Also, you're not quite correct as to your statement that "'supplemental payments' won't cover plaintiff's legal fees unless plaintiffs prevail on damages for property damage -- otherwise, the insurer has no duty to indemnify, even if there's some kind of statutory overlay as with manufactured houses." Supplemental payments are paid on any "'suit' against an insured [the insurer] defends." Let's say the insurer defends, settles under a reservation of rights, then prevails on a dec action regarding an exclusion which bars coverage for the entire loss. Even though there was no covered property damage, the insurer still can't avoid the supplemental payments since it defended the insured.

I think the Lost divide is based partially on what people consider to be Lost's "mysteries". I was checking out comments in the A/V Club, and someone had a list of mysteries that hadn't been solved, including stuff like (I'm paraphrasing)

-why was "quaratine" painted on the hatch and what medicine was Desmond taking?

-why do we keep seeing the same minor recurring characters meeting different major characters in the off-island flashbacks/forwards?

Me, I don't see those things as "mysteries" to be solved and spelled out for the viewers. I say, well, since we don't know of anyone actually being sick, the "quarantine" thing may have just been a scam to keep someone in the hatch pressing that button and we already know that most of the major characters were only one or two few degrees removed from one another, so to me, those aren't "mysteries".

In fact, I'm not sure there really are any mysteries. I don't really care *how* the smoke monster works (is it ancient magic? advanced technology?). It seems to follow certain rules and that's good enough for me. The closest thing there are to mysteries in my opinion are things like "is so-and-so good or evil?" and I'm not sure that even those questions have answers, because maybe the Lost universe is too morally ambiguous for Ben Linus to always be evil and Jack to always be good.

Just one guy's opinion, anyway.

My previous post wasn't really directed at you. I first thought to post about the black smoke, but changed my mind without changing the subject line. Anyway, re: smoke monster: we have learned something new about most every time we've seen it. It appears to be a kind of defense system/judge which Ben was able to (more-or-less) control (he was able to release it, at least).

I think the big difference between The X-Files and Lost is that in The X-Files, the creators presented answers to the viewers, then randomly took those answers away. I loved TXF, but for me it lived and died on the strength of the MOTW eps.

In Lost, the answers aren't taken away: answers are presented from the point of view of one character's history, but then we later learn from the point of view of another character's history something new or different about what happened which changes the viewers understanding of what happened. The view is given a different perspective, thus changing the meaning or significance of events (this is especially so in the case of Sun and Jin).

Just my opinion.

Well, then Rove et al. have nothing to worry about, do they?