opm – Federal Disability Attorney

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: The pleasantry of paper’s caress

Posted onJune 21, 2016AuthorFederal Disability Retirement AttorneyLeave a comment

Will the electronic tablet ever replace paper’s longstanding sovereignty? The invention, dissemination and widespread availability of paper was a notable mark in human progression — if only for what it allowed in establishing communication, transfusion of knowledge and conveyance of data. Like Gutenberg’s movable type printing press, the cotton gin, the Model T Ford and the computer chip of modernity, such inventions became, in retrospect, tumultuous benchmarks of human advancement. If advertising images reflect a hope of an industry, it is clear that paper’s replacement is a target of that sector. […] Read More …

OPM Medical Retirement: When we used to speak of meaningful things

Posted onMay 31, 2016AuthorFederal Disability Retirement AttorneyLeave a comment

Perhaps the negation of ideas trickles down, just as water from a crack in the roof tiles; of Derrida, Foucault and the deconstruction movement after the lengthy period of disillusionment represented by the French Existentialists headed by Camus and Sartre; for, if meaning constitutes parity and the loss of hierarchies and paradigms in crumbling corners of inconvenient truths, then Orwell’s prediction of how totalitarianism will infect society with the tools of our own making, will come about sooner than we thought possible. […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Federal Service: Profiles in Discourage

Posted onApril 12, 2016AuthorFederal Disability Retirement AttorneyLeave a comment

It is, of course, an obvious play off of the 1957 Pulitzer Prize winning work (publication date of 1955), describing 8 U.S. Senators who displayed courage in the face of criticism (an inherent oxymoron?). Whether or not, and to what extent, Kennedy himself wrote the work (Ted Sorenson, John F.’s speechwriter, finally conceded in his 2008 autobiography as much) has become historically irrelevant, for the legend has become the man, and has replaced the truth of clear lines that once constituted the demarcation between fantasy and reality. […] Read More …

Federal Employment Medical Separation & Retirement: Putting forth an air of pretension

Posted onApril 9, 2016AuthorFederal Disability Retirement AttorneyLeave a comment

Why is it that changing one’s vernacular accent is considered pretentious? What if people, on a daily basis, came into the office and assumed a different dialect — the Northerner with a sudden affectation of a Southern drawl; a Midwesterner assuming the melody of the Irish; or the New Englander presuming upon a Jamaican tango; and the next day, in random turns, everyone played musical chairs with the spoken word and its vehicle of communication — why would we be critical of such a display of linguistic malleability? The phonetics of pretension remain predictably unacceptable; somehow, we know that a certain “putting on” of an accent is either bad or less than genuine. […] Read More …

Federal & Postal Employee Medical Separation: The abstract concept of “the other”

Posted onApril 5, 2016AuthorFederal Disability Retirement AttorneyLeave a comment

Existentialism could only have arisen from the ashes of nihilism; Western Philosophy, spanning the spectrum of metaphysics, epistemology, Rationalism, Empiricism and the tradition of questioning origins, essences and the compendium of who we are and what it all means, does not lead to the natural annihilation of intellectual curiosity. But Existentialism, does. Why? Because Existentialism is an emotional reaction, rather than a rational rebuttal. From the horrors of Nazi concentration camps and the denigration of human dignity reduced to mere abstractions, the philosophy of negation of which it is characterized, […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement Pension Annuity: Today, life is good…

Posted onMarch 28, 2016AuthorFederal Disability Retirement AttorneyLeave a comment

It is the set of 3 periods at the end of the sentence, identified in grammatical terms as an ellipses, allowing for a trailing thought or a hesitation of motive, and here which differentiates from a singular finality of a period postulated to prevent a purposive punctuality of partition from a postscript. If the last two periods were extracted and deleted, the delineation would connote a declarative assertion, unhesitant in conclusion, and confident in execution. With those two additions, it implies and denotes hesitancy, a pause leaving the impression of loss or lack of confidence, and unable to determine the cogency of opinion formulated but for the ellipses. […] Read More …

OPM Retirement Benefits for Disabled Employees: Discovering the natural teleology

Posted onMarch 5, 2016March 29, 2022AuthorFederal Disability Retirement AttorneyLeave a comment

It is for that function or use in society that we strive in our early years; while some may argue that the extrinsic relationship between career and one’s natural abilities make for an artificial coalescence of man-to-meaning, nevertheless, the adaptation to societal needs results in the correspondence between man’s inherent want and the contribution to a greater good. But what happens when, later in life, the fusion of ability with societal need is abandoned? […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: The change is in us

Posted onDecember 4, 2015AuthorFederal Disability Retirement AttorneyLeave a comment

We wake up each morning expecting the world to have remained unaltered during the night; yet, as Hume’s argument concerning causality would have us believe, there is no necessary connection we have identified or conceptually ascertained, but merely our imagination anticipating and projecting into the future, such that stability of the universe around us pervades in a constancy of regularity. The surroundings remain familiar; the coffee machine is of the same make as when we left it the night before; even the dogs appear unchanged, ready to obey and begin the day in the fashion that canines are accustomed to. […] Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement Attorney: Avoiding the Pedantic Prophet

Posted onMay 1, 2015AuthorFederal Disability Retirement AttorneyLeave a comment

Doomsayers are everywhere, and in every generation and region of thoughtful pronouncements, prophets foretelling of anticipated events await to ring the ears of those who desire future confirmation of that which was already expected. Beyond the general prophesy of future events, however, is the one who focuses upon minutiae and details irrelevant to the greater paradigm of events. It is like the man who was informed that major surgery would be necessary, and oh, by the way, the scalpel to be used is made by a German manufacturer whose great uncle was related to Lord Byron. […] Read More …

Expanding the Significance of Individual Federal Employee Disability Cases

Posted onNovember 20, 2014AuthorFederal Disability Retirement AttorneyLeave a comment

Lawyers daily engage in it; courts are sometimes receptive to it; the public is rarely approving of it. Expanding the literal language of a statute by reading meaning into words, phrases and conceptual paradigms not otherwise manifested or obvious in the words enacted, is a language game which some call intellectual brilliance, while others deem to be disingenuous or otherwise dishonest, to be blunt about it. The “it”, of course, is the compendium of the expanded impact and relevance of consequences resulting from statutory language, some intended, others unintended. […]

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