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A question came up at work about a LtCol that was retiring from the Air Force in 2007.  I wondered what an “equivalent” civilian salary would be in the contractor world for this person.  The military web pages at about.com provided numbers.

For a LtCol with 23 years in service, on flight status, monthly salary is:
$  495.00 flight pay
$ 7373.10 base pay
$  192.74 BAS (Basic Allowance for Sustenance)
$ 2324.00 BAH (Basic Allowance for Housing, Edwards AFB)
———
$10384.84 /mo 

BAS and BAH are not taxed at the marginal 28% Federal tax rate, giving another $629.19 /mo benefit when converting to civilian pay.

Equivalent monthly civilian income would be:
$ 11,014 /mo

Equivalent annual salary:
$132,168.36 /year

That’s not counting the approximately 2.5% x 23 years => $4239.54 /mo retirement pay from the military.  Adding them together gives about $183,042.75 /year income.

Maybe I should have stayed active duty military!

Tonight I watched the finale of Survivor’s 15th season. I remember the first season application deadline was Spring of 1999. It’s clearly become an American Icon.

Tonight Dreamz’ decision to reneg on his promise to Yau Man was distasteful to me. As I spoke with friends about the situation, I realized the most generous I could be is to recognize the scoping of the game. In other words, does the scope and boundary of the game allow you to be someone you’re not in the real world?

Dreamz swore with God’s name and spoke of the mandatory witness to his son and other kids he would help. Privately and invididually to the production cameras he implied the same, so it wasn’t just to influence other players. Later he claimed he planned to lie and mislead all the way along because it’s only part of the game. In essence, he claimed lying in the scope of the game isn’t the same as lying outside the scope of the game, in real life.

When my children were between the ages of 3 and 7, I was challenged to teach them when lying is wrong, and when lying is only “kidding” or “joking”. The most reliable standard I came up with was that it counts as lying if the other person doesn’t know you’re joking.

Dreamz should have stood on such a standard. I was surprised that nobody mentioned either of two facts: 1) by hanging onto the necklace, he did not have a chance at the prize, because nobody would vote for him, and 2) by giving up the necklace he would have made much more than the million dollar prize value by being a true role model to other homeless, and inner city kids, and minorities. I mean “much more” both figuratively and quantitatively. Think of the book deals and speaking tours. These would have replaced the $1M taxable prize money with much more than that as business income, with huge tax write-offs for touring the country or even the world.

Hang onto your life and lose it. Or lose your life to save it. This isn’t theoretical mumbo jumbo. Do you see that it’s real and pragmatic?

“What is to give light must endure burning” – Viktor Frankl.

I saw this quote for the first time yesterday.  I Googled Viktor Frankl and found that he built an entire third pillar of psychotherapy, Logotherapy, after Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual pschology.

Logotherapy is a form of Existential Analysis which is classified right up there with two you’ve heard of:

• Freud’s “Will to pleasure”
• Nietzchian “Will to power”
• Frankl’s “Will to meaning”

While I don’t agree with Existential Analysis (“nothing is out there in the world exept us humans”), Frankl’s conclusions seem to be the closest to my beliefs.  Perhaps because he searches for meaning, and I believe this is a fundamental human tendency, albeit for reasons Frankl does not ascede to. It seems his professional writings grew out of losing all his family, save a sister, in the holocaust, and he spent several years in German concentration camps. That pain, filtered through his mind, convinced him that there is and should be meaning in all things both pleasant and unpleasant.

Logotherapy’s seven principles seem to resonate with anybody who has read through the Pauline literature of the New Testament:

• Exercise the freedom to choose your attitude (a freedom that can never be taken away)
• Realize your will to meaning
• Detect the meaning of life’s moments
• Don’t work against yourself
• Look at yourself from a distance
• Shift your focus of attention
• Extend beyond yourself

Perhaps when I have a moment, I’ll write entries on each of these seven principles and show how they’re subsumed inside the New Testament teachings of Jesus Christ.

Update: Looks like it’s already been done in a book by Timothy Lent, titled “Christian Themes in Logotherapy“. Reading an internet excerpt drew the analogy even tighter when the three Frankl’s three methods of finding meaning were listed.  Compare these to three broad category of “God-followers” you can find in the world.  He proposes meaning comes from:

1. A deed we do, or work we create. This reminds me a lot of Christians who tend toward works righteousness. You did good.  God likes you.  Go to heaven.  Many other religions have this flavor, too.
2. An experience we have such as love. This reminds me of Christians who tend toward Spirit-led free forms of knowing God, easily deviating from Biblical revelation.
3. A change in attitude when confronted with unchangeable fate.  Although Frankl’s idea is built on a bad unchangeable fate, this seems very close to a humble human willing to change according to the commands and blessings of a sovereign, loving, unchangeable God.