What a waste of tradition.

I have a pic of myself here in front of the Cannon that was on the front side of the Academy, I wonder what they did with this artifact of history and all the other artifacts in that place.

There was a huge pipe organ (phantom of the opera style) in the Chapel area, with a secret room large enough to hold a couple people, we used to hide out in it when we didn’t want to be found. LOL.

Lorocca’s brother sounds like a great guy, he attended St. John’s at the same time Jim Lovell’s (Apollo 13 commander) son did, apparently. I used to wrestle there.

Danny Gable was the god of all American wrestlers at that time, we all said a prayer to Dan before every match, lol.

I wonder if they played Taps over the Academy before they bulldozed it.

Later

Two more memories and then I take the Long Walk of Shame again:

I marched behind that Drum and Bugle Corp three times a day to every meal, I was woken up every morningby a bugler blowing Reville and went to sleep every night to one playing Taps. A bugle in that stone building standing in the middle of that rotunda sounded like he was right next to your bed blowing that thing in your ear.

The most comforting and haunting sound I know is the playing of Taps.

My Dad was a Coast Guard Trainer in San Deigo when he was a young guy four six years, and he was also a bugler, having learned to play the trunpet in church when he was a boy. Between his memories passed on to me of him playing reville and Taps over the Coast guard Station in San Diego, and hearing that music every day in military academy, and then hearing it throughout my Army enlistment. The guys in the band were the best buglars I have ever heard, in terms of military band music, anyway. They never missed a note and could hold the last note of Taps for at least a minute.

Eerie!!!!!

I don’t remember his name, maybe if i saw a photo. The Drum and Bugle Corp Major was a guy named Cosmo who looked like he belonged in one of those old beach blanket movies, blonde and buffed, with an IQ of about -10. He used to drink straight rubbing alchohol! The band lived on the third floor of the academy and were sort of aloof to everybody else, so we didn’t fraternize which is probably why I don’t remember him. The Company Commander was a black guy named Timmons.

My roomate’s name was Steve Gutman. I have old Polaroid photos of us in our dress blues on the day we filmed that scene on the parade field, and in the rotunda.

I was on the wrestling team, and the baseball team, and the rifle team. I have tried to find that academy on the web a couple years bqack and couldn’t find it. I don’t know if it’s still a military academy or what, but the building has to be there i’m sure, it was huge and made out of granite, had old roman columns and every inch of that place was cold stone. Don’t gtme started on how much physical pain I endured at that place under the sadistic authority of the cadet officers. When the staff went home at night, the seniors ruled, and they were not nice. I saw a kid beat to death one night in a latrine, at least he looked dead and they carried him off and we never saw him again. He was jumped by 12 senior cadets, one of them threw a frozen soda can and hit him in them neck and busted his vein. His face wa unrecognizable when they carried him out.

I probably did over a million push-ups while I was at that school. It was not unusual for me to drop and do 100-200 push-ups at a time, several times a day. At age 14, I could drop and do 100 push-ups in a minute, no lie.

Okay, that’s enough reminiscing.

I played 5 hours yesterday, big mistake. I ran out of gas about 2.5 hours, and they had to wake me up in between each bet, not fun when you are one of the other players trying to get to the next hand because you threw away 27os before the flop and you had the same hand 30 hands before that. Waiting in-between while some geriatric boob slows down your game can be real torture.

Next, I stayed so long because there was a football pool, the Cardinals game. Now my numbers were real crap, you know 6 and 2, stuff like that. But aren;t we all hopeless optimists when it comes to our numbers? Keeps you there. I have reason to be optimistic, about two years ago I won $1500 in a Suns basketball pool at the same place when my numbers hit the big pick-your-name-out-of-a-barrel-of-one-thousand-other-names- miracle

My wife always complains when I gamble, which about 2x a year now, because losing $60 or $100 is simply nothing nmore than losing one more mall trip to her, which is about 52x a year. So it’s really unfair to her when I do it. But when you come home and count out 15 one hundred dollar biulls into her palm, which I did that time, I’m a HERO!!!!!!

I like being a HERO.

But not this time. I stayed even through most of those 5 hours and died a quiet death sometime in the third quarter.

And then, to top off that misery was the Scottsdale idiot sitting to the right of me in the number 8 seat. This brilliant strategist didn’t want his football ticket (free) for some reason. Perhaps gambling is against his religion, I don’t know. He was losing every hand in poker, so that wasn’t really gambling, was it? It was charity.

Anyway, during one quarter he grabs his ticket, looks at it, tosses it back to the dealer (who cannot give that one out to anyone after he’s throw it back to her). 7 and 0. !!!!!

He could have given it to me, but NOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Damned communist.

Anyway, of course, his numbers hit. $400 down the rabbit hole. He was in the restroom when the quarter ended, and when he got back I said, “Nice goin’ Sherlock Holmes, your numbers just hit.”

He didn’t care. He’s got a social security check to burn through. Not that he needs the social security, he’s a Scottsdale millionaire who uses the SS check for chips once a month.

So, as my last chip splashed the pot in disgust, I contemplated my latest move to try and get out for some entertainment.

I had AA, naturally. You always get the best pre-flop hand, right before they take your last ten dollars. Naturally they crashed and burned.

I limped home dejected, still having profited $40 for two days, but somehow that didn’t help my depression. Should have gone fishin’

Now I remember why I shouldn’t gamble. LOL.

Evolution is like a big poker game. It looks beautiful at first, wonderfully complex and intertwined with each other iun seemingly endless permutations of future possibilities.

Then it kills you and eats you for lunch.

Anyway, all of these models are strong evidentialist models, and all of them fail the test of rationality, from both a materialist perspective, as well as from a perspective of Biblical Theology.

Why go through all that just to come up with theories that can be easily shown to not work, and then you lose the traditioonal approach anyway. What are you gaining by using failed apologetics?

You may as well stand up like a man, admit your limitations, and perhaps you’ll discover a new and grand and beautiful universal theory.

It may not convert the materialist, but you know what? We can’t even convert our own members at this point, the arguments are so unconvincing and self-refuting.

I guess that’s what I’m saying is that I’m not so egotistical to think that I have thought out everything that needs to be thought of under a presuppositional construct. But, dammit, I was the FIRST, and I have provided some damn good foundationa;l ideas from which others smarter than I and better trained than I, can extrapolate a real model.

I want men (or women) who can think better than the old guard to take these concepots that I can teach them and apply real disciplined explanatory poer to, and revolutionize the Christian world with it.

And it doesn’t stop at creationism, it runs right into soteriology and christology, and eschatology as well, subjects that if reformed, could transform Christianity completely.

Oh, btw, I won $200 bucks tonight playing hold ‘em. My Momma gave me fifty bucks for my birthday back on the 11th, but I wasn;t well enough to go anywhere till now. Haven’t played any poker in six months. I gave my wife half of it and I think I’m gonna take a stab at a tournament tomorrow, but I don;t know if I can sit upright for 4-5 hours. We’ll see.

Later

What gave them these ideas were the discovery, actually many discoveries cataloged over time, known as the “missing links” in creationist circles, in other words the intermediate transitional fossil record. Creationists have long cired, “show us the money!” when it came to the transitionals, and we of course know that they are there and in lists of hundreds. These “punctuations” in the long record of gradualism show leaps in biological evolution that stagger the mind. Sometimes they show small changes, sometimes big changes.

The point I making is that Gould and Eldridge took the old evolutioionary hypothesis, turned it on it’s head so to speak, and made every change their thinking about how evolution works.

What I am attempting to do is turn parts or all of creationist theory on it’s head.

Theistic evolutionist? What are you really adding to the creationist subject? NOTHING. You are a functional atheist. Death before the Fall is a fatal construct to Christian philosophy and theology. This is also a god of the gaps construct, just the gap is before the big bang instead of after.

Progressive Creationist? You are a functional theistic evolutionist whether you admit it or not. Saying that God is behind trillions of little miracles, all following the evolutionary record through the ages, says NOTHING. Death before the Fall is a fatal construct to Christian philosophy and theology. That is God of the gaps, by definition.

Young-earth Creationist? Well, need I say more? Biblical Creationism, yes. Scientific Creationism, in the trash bin. Evidentialism doesn’t work, period. There’s been enough time for all of us to learn this simple point. EVIDENTIALISM IN CHRISTIAN COSMOGONY IS BATTING A ZERO BATTING AVERAGE.

I tend to think of PC in this light, if that’s not too egotistical. PC is the creationist form of punctuated equilibrium. LOL.

That’s an interesting comparison, could you elaborate a bit on what you’re getting at?