Pilot's Log

He didn't make the audition for DIESEL SWEETIES, and this was the only other gig available.

As a Christmas gift, my sister and brother-in-law gave me a copy of the American Heritage History Of World War Two which I had never owned before, in spite of my long years of interest in the period of history.

What is sparking this particular note here is a table that was calculated by the corporate contractor that the Nazi German government had running the Holocaust death camps. (Yes, THAT Schindler. Him and his peers.) They had calculated the profit for an "average" inmate who was put to death after a mere nine months of slave labor. I won't reproduce it here, because I'm sure it's available on-line somewhere and I could probably come back and link it if I want.

I decided to interpolate the data in the table to the here and now. First, I found a site that had foreign exchange rate data, which told me how much a ReichsMark was worth in Dollars before hostilities broke with America. Then, I found another site to give me inflation figures for the last seventy years.

Care to guess? How much was a human life worth to Mr. Schindler and his kind?

$45.50 in 2012 money. Less than most of my friends pay for their TV programming per month, I imagine. About a week's worth of groceries for my household.

Would you kill somebody for $45.50? How many people on this world now would answer "Yes" to that question? The only way to guarantee that everybody answer "No" is to raise everybody's standard of living to the level that a human life is more than that figure. It is too cheap in too many places for us to say "Never Again" and mean it.

If there's a moral to be found: too often these days the fathers of commerce tell the underlings "we need results!--How you get them is your business, not ours!" And so they morally support the methods of the underlings' activities regardless of the risks. But the dice will always come up snakeeyes, eventually. "Plausible denial" ("Oh, we never asked how they got the information beyond verifying the sources") is no excuse anymore. At least, nobody is going to accept that as an excuse anymore.

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"Is it worth it?"

USELESS, USELESS, USELESS!

...Is suddenly becoming aware that you've already made a deal with him--and had no choice about it.

Hey. Have you any idea how hard it is to find decent floor plans of Graceland over the Internet? I had to go all the way to a site in Holland for some...

You see, the MJ saga has brought back memories from the summer of 1977 when Elvis Presley died. For a while, I'd had an idea for a story, with the working title Equation, partly based on the time-travel stories of Heinlein, and somewhat akin to The Butterfly Effect, but told from the side of the character whose life is the one initially being meddled with, rather than the meddler. Well, the character in question is an 11-year-old boy in 1977, and his first adventure makes him something of a celebrity. In a following segment, he gets invited to a party at Graceland by Lisa Marie...and one of the other guests there is a teenage friend of hers name of Michael Jackson. Well, the hero knows their destinies, but there's the ethical dilemma of whether to speak or stay silent. Whether to tell the truth, however offensive or dangerous it may be, or enable their fantasies.

I know I'm not the only one to think these things...but what if hindsight ISN'T 20/20 vision?

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I didn't get my license till well after I turned 18, so I don't count. Of course, at 16 I was starting airplane pilot lessons, so I don't count that way either. Fewer things to run into above the traffic pattern, you know.

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Tell. If it happened to me I'd want somebody to tell me.