Early Retirement for Injured Federal Employees
The great thing about it is that most people are willing to give it out in endless streams of inarticulate bosh for free, and the rest of us are at liberty to do with it what we want. With the advent of the Internet, and more so with the consolidation of all things electronic into a single, hand-held device — the so-called “Smartphone” […]
Can a footman in former times, or a scullery maid while scrubbing the floors, experience envy when class structures forbade any hope of advancing beyond? In days before of rigid demarcations of social and class differentiations, where terms in modernity like “upward mobility” or “moving up the ladder” (have you ever wondered at the condescending connotation of such terms, where “up” is the direction of the movement, as if one were ascending to the heavens, even when such barometric activity often corresponded to moral degradation and sacrifice of one’s character?) were unheard of, […]
Have you ever observed the child who takes a stick and imagines himself/herself (we are trying to maintain the decorum of political correctness, here, by including all genders, because the implication otherwise in using a reflexive pronoun identifying a specific population apparently denotes that excluding the other half-or-so of the world’s inhabitants is discriminatory and an engagement of possible malfeasance, which we would not want to be charged with) emboldened by a weapon in hand and being the hero of an imaginary battle, […]
The comparative life is an illusion of sorts; Plato’s theme throughout is established every day, as appearances hide the reality beneath, and the allegory of the Cave – where shadows constitute the seeming truth and the truth appears as hidden seeming – is merely an archaic anachronism that has been vanquished, if merely because no one gives much weight to dead philosophers and nobody has the time for reflection upon questions that cannot provide answers instantaneously, as Google and High Speed Internet have allowed us to become accustomed. […]
Separation, distance, objectification and electronic means of communication; the loss of human emotions in the very living of life, where the organic has become equivalent to the android, where the original concept encompassed an admixture of synthetic humanity and the combining of components both human and mechanized […]
Is it an oxymoron? If it is made, how can it be negated by untruth; for, if it is a nothingness at the outset which compels null and void the substantive content of the thing itself, how can it purport to be what it is while at the same time creating an abyss of meaninglessness? A promise cannot be false if it is to have the very meaning of a promise; and yet, we know that there exists such falsity of posited assurances, if not proposed by dishonest individuals and con-men, then at least by unintentional or otherwise mistaken pillars of vain malfeasance. […]
Why are some better at preemptively addressing recognizable foreshadowing? Is it a genetic predisposition related to the capacity of surviving? Like the instinctive responses of animals, is it an inherent trait that favors those who are more “fit” with such a characteristic, and thus to the disadvantage of those who do not possess it, […]
How do we come to learn how to do it? Certainly, we come across certain eccentric individuals who defy every conventional norm, and somehow manage to appear as if they have done what otherwise we recognize as not having been completed. Have you ever come across someone who just isn’t “quite right” – such that, when you ask a question, the tangents that flood forth and the meandering thought processes make it an arbitrary conclusion as to whether it was the specific question asked that prompted the incommensurate response, or just the mere fact of a tonal posit of a question-like query that compelled a verbal reaction, even if it has nothing to do with the substance of the question itself? […]
We rarely do that. Yes, we sometimes allow for a partiality of such circumstances to remain, knowing that it may or may not happen; but the conceptual distinction between “pure” and left otherwise is a gap likened between omniscience and imperfect knowledge, or the ability to observe brilliance in action while the rest of us scrounge about for some semblance of competence. Then, of course, there is a wide chasm in the spectrum of what it means to leave things to chance, in contradistinction to “pure” chance. The difference is often seen as tantamount to the extreme arbitrariness of lack of human involvement […]