Federal Employee Disability Retirement: Conversation of one

Are we the only species which engages in it? Do we ever see a dog standing aside and participating in such a phenomena? Or a cardinal pausing in its morning melody of exuberant sing-song in order to address a non-existent other? And, it isn’t even an artifice or convention for which the actor is being paid, as in an “aside” or a “soliloquy” where private thoughts are spoken aloud for the benefit of the audience, but where others in the drama act “as if” such thoughts are unspoken and shared not. […] Read More …

Medical Retirement from Federal Employment: Magic & the laziness factor

Magic is something we cling on to, if only as a last vestige of the light of hope, flickering ever so delicately against the tumultuous winds of a world gone mad. In childhood, it was an imagination enlivened by the pure delight of fairytales, mythologies and rhymes of wands in the single sweep where the golden dust of insurmountable problems is suddenly a trail of corrective bygones with mere words of incantations mysterious to eyes agape with wonderment and awe; and in the middle-to-growing times, the words altered somewhat, the concept changed and the linguistic construct evolved to imply an attitude, […] Read More …

FERS & CSRS Disability Retirement: Of consideration and comity

The singular identifiable factor that destroys is the very reflection which elevates; for, it is power which undermines the source of comity. With it is accompanied the shedding of a need for appearances; that which genuinely festers beneath the surface can bubble up into the tyrant which we all can become, and of that which we suppress and repress throughout our miserable lives. Why does “winning the lottery”, in whatever proverbial form that can take, destroy lives, divide marriages and deconstruct lifelong friendships? Read More …

OPM Disability Retirement: Of the politics of human discontent

Long ago, it was figured out; by men and women smarter than the general population, the ingredients of democracy and seizing of power became fixed in a formula of compromise; in politics, discontent is the source of unrest, and change is the power switch that turns the electorate around. Rousseau over-romanticized that mythological “State of Nature“, but accurately recognized the human tendency towards the need to accumulate the leisurely graces of societal accouterments. […] Read More …