Federal Disability Retirement Representation: The pecking order

Watching birds fly and cavort around a bird-feeder, one realizes that the term as applied to human conduct is not too far from the reality of the natural order of things.  There is, indeed, a “pecking order” in the world of birds and fowls aflight; it has to do with size, aggression, quickness and desire to survive. In other words, how birds behave is not too far afield from the way in which humans interact. […] Read More …

Federal Employee Disability Retirement: Distractions

They are the projects of life of which Heidegger recognizes, allowing for avoiding the inevitabilities of life’s challenges; of fate, mortality, future insecurity, and death.  What quantifiable slice of one’s life is governed by distractions?  Must it always be less than 50% in order to remain so, and if it exceeds that halfway point, does it then become something substantive and not merely the peripheral meaning of what it means to “be distracted”?  If a distraction is considered to be an aside – that which waylays a person’s attention by focusing upon […] Read More …

Federal Disability Retirement: The tentative step

This is a tough and dangerous world. No longer a Hobbesian State of Nature nor of War, the Social Contract as envisioned by Locke or Rousseau provides some nominal protection, and thus do we identify ourselves as “civilized” entities in yet a dystopian universe where a greater majority of the rest of the world acts with unconcerned insanity by engaging in senseless wars of mass killings and genocidal encounters. In such a world, we thoughtlessly bring newborns who must contend with an uncertain future, fraught with challenges unasked for and conflicts yet to be encountered. […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Federal Government Employment: Ruins

We take extraordinary steps just to visit them; of the Parthenon, the Athenian Acropolis; of the Great Wall of China; of unspeaking relics where life once bustled, and still does but in a different way; of mere onlookers to a civilization once vibrant, but now twice removed — first, in the incremental abandonment of a society no longer relevant, and second, by the implicit concession that tourism establishes the death of the substantive content of any collection of structures. Or of Aleppo, where modern-day devastation intersects with the ruins of old, and where actual suffering echoes throughout the ancient cascades where antiquity overwhelms the current screams of flesh and blood. […] Read More …