Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
We all possess them; some, more than others; most, of a harmless variety where — so long as they are kept private and unannounced like an illegitimate child kept from the knowledge of one’s spouse, friends and family — no consequences ensue from the mere “having” of them. False notions can take many forms, and on the spectrum of held beliefs, […]
What are the criteria by which one lives? Is there a singular, dominant principle, as in “A Criterion” or “The Criterion”, or multiple ones; or perhaps an overarching archetype with subsets of mini-components that are all in their aggregate subsumed by a greater Platonic Form, somewhat like “Goodness” that predominates, with subtexts of lesser categories? Or, do we just blunder through life without them and arbitrarily bump into decisions,[…]
What defines arbitrariness? Is it when there is a lack of pattern, or does our own input of misunderstanding or lack of comprehension determine the defined formlessness of the world around us? Is Kant right in his implications – that the “noumenal” world that is outside of our sphere of cognitive input remains unknowable, arbitrary, unfathomable and unreachable, and it is only by the categories of internal psychological structures that we naturally impose upon the world, make sense of it, […]
We have all heard the boast: “I do more work in an hour than most people do in a week”; “I earn the wages of 10 people before breakfast”; “I do twice the work for half the pay”; and on and on. The plain fact is that each individual, no matter the self-interested tropes of inane contradictions, performs the quantitative and qualitative labor of that singular effort, and no more. Some may meet greater production quotas; others may appear to make significantly faster headway into concluding projects and assignments; but the boast of self-worth is nothing more than a comparative analysis which ultimately fails when proper relative proportionality is conducted; […]
Can a verse stand alone, isolated in its metrical composition, without preceding or succeeding contextual delineations? Of what value can the singular have, without the surrounding aggregation of the whole? Like a scrap or fragment of a larger narrative revelation, of archaeologists and anthropologists working with but a piece of the greater story, the verse of 1-liners forever echoes for a harkening of others to join. John Donne poetically captured the sense of that isolation, and Thomas Merton wrote a reflective narrative upon that very theme […]
Thoughts are essentially neutral, until they interact with the greater community of ideas. Once introduced before the judgment of others, the validity, rightness or fallacy of the substantive content can be challenged, and ultimately tested in the arena of reality. Life can often present a harshness of consequences; ideas left in the insular universe of solitary contingencies, confined as unchallenged and ultimately deprived of consideration, are mere artifices of impotence otherwise lost in the vacuity of meaningless tropes. “Right” thinking becomes so when thrown into the arena of a community. […]
It is always that minor impurity which devalues the whole; “but for” the element identified as an invasive component, the rest would constitute the purity of perfections. It is how we point fingers and bemoan the state of our own affairs; and how we make of a peripheral inconsequence the centrality of our problems. The evil that we identify as the foundational source of a problem is merely the canard for justification, and in the end, we don’t want it to go away, but to remain as fodder to fester as the legitimate basis of an illegitimate claim. […]
Repetition and regularity provides a semblance of orderliness; somehow, patterns in life remain relevant to sanity and stability, and it is the disordered patchwork which creates havoc for want of consistency. There are those who seek regularity, and are criticized for embracing boredom; then, the one who constantly lives on the edge, where being fired and not knowing the future of tomorrow is handled with a mere shrug and an attitude of libertine disregard. Most of us live in the middle of extremes; that is why, in reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, no extent of profundity is discovered; the median between two extremes is what most of us naturally seek, anyway. […]