Disability Retirement from Federal Service: By what right?

It is a question often posed in the dead of night by those who would undermine an assertion based upon an instinctive sense of fairness, but perhaps not able to be articulated in comprehensible form.  By what right do you enter these premises?  By what right do you express that opinion?  By what right do you think you can do that?  It is, as with many questions, one that has a sadly contextual background of a negative past – for, whenever a person, a populace or a segment of a greater society begins to assert a “right”, […] Read More …

Federal & Postal Disability Retirement: The persistent tinnitus of life

The root word that contains a valid diagnosis of a medical condition, sometimes comes about gradually, others at a persistent rate of uncommon urgency; and whether by emanation of a serious, primary condition such as Meniere’s Disease, a brain tumor or cardiac elements impacting upon the heart or blood vessels, or mere residuals from a short-lived ear infection, the low, persistent ringing can interrupt and disrupt focus, concentration, attention to detail, and lead to depression, anxiety and panic […] Read More …

Federal Employee Medical Retirement: Minding the ‘happiness principle’

Is there such a thing?  Certainly, enough authors, gurus and faith-healers have claimed it, packaged it and sold it as a commodity to be prepared, marketed and purchased.  Somehow, we are all gullible enough to believe in it:  Just as sorcerers of old possessed powers beyond human comprehension, so we hold on to the hope that such secrets of soothsayers mixing the concoction in a cauldron of expectations may boil over with fumes and aromas we can smell into oblivion.  That secret incantation; those mysterious sequence of codes  […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: Today (pause), and Tomorrow

The parenthetical insertion creates a “real-time” interlude, and the addendum of the grammatical mandate, the unnecessary comma, extends the strained quietude of wanting to engage the sequential utterance.  […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Federal Government Employment: Life’s enjoyment

Are we ever taught that?  If the answer is in the negative, then from whence did we learn, attain or otherwise receive the tools to engage in the purity of sensation such that we could embrace it?  Did we become such through osmosis; from imprints; from learned behavior encompassing a lifetime of observations reinforced by wisdom’s refrain upon the blank chalkboard of our consciousness?  How does one “enjoy” life, anymore than learning to ride a bicycle, drive a car or care for a cute puppy […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement: Living versus being alive

There is a difference, is there not?  Of hummingbirds and cardinals bright against the backdrop of an evergreen; of a child running across the grassy knoll; then of aged men in nursing homes, shuttered away in corners where the drool of saliva unwiped reveals the tarnish of human unkindness; and of prisons rotting away with crowded cells for addicts whose sickness is considered a crime where, in ages past, opium dens and other vices merely preached in empty churches of the difference between mortal and venial sins unrehearsed. […] Read More …

Federal & Postal Disability Retirement Benefits: Immunity

It is both a state of protective legal cover, as well as possessing enough strength of resistance to counter the invective of marauding viruses invading beyond the walls of health-moats keeping out unwanted Trojan horse violators.  In the former meaning, it is often granted through agreeing to deliver the goods on others, and breaching the code of silence in stabbing unsuspecting co-conspirators in the proverbial backsides, but assuring survival of the weakest link in the chain of criminal conduct. […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Federal Employment: The immovable individual

Aristotle’s unmoved mover is an interesting conceptual posit:  it is based upon the cohesive compromise between the Pre-Socratics as paradigmatic examples encapsulated by Parmenides and Heraclitus – of the universe as seen in a singular “oneness” as opposed to embroiled in constant flux and change.  The unmoved mover consolidates into a synergistic compromise the pendulum between the two extremes:  […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement for Federal Employees: The compromised life

We all make them, though we deny it. Iconoclasts scorn it; the extremes of either side scoff at it; and, in the end, it reflects the reality of who we are, how we live, and by what vaunted principles we purportedly possess.

On a theoretical level, it is easy to remain the stalwart – that singular entity standing on principle and commitment. The one who has never experienced war – to express beliefs of “courage”, “unwavering loyalty” and blind bravery declared in wrappings of the flag and national identity. Or of fidelity and traditional values despite personal shortcomings of multiple marital infidelities and 3 or 4 marriages, […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: False Positives

We demand that a “retest” be done, to ensure that the result did not have the opposite effect.  It is a linguistic conundrum that the affirmative means its negative; for, in medicine, a “positive” result is the worst of news, whereas in most every other context, it is a welcomed declarative.  But because it is a result which is not embraced with delight, […] Read More …