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TwiceHorn

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Posts posted by TwiceHorn

  1. 8 hours ago, bolverk said:

     

    This probably isn't the best comparison, but I'd say that in some ways, it's psychologically like being on a sports team. You're part of a group doing something intense together that builds strong bonds and creates lasting memories for a specific period of time, and under the guidance of coaches / camp counselors.

    That's pretty apt.  I went to Camp Longhorn one summer after fifth grade and was a bit young for it as an only child and had some homesickness.

    The following school year, I got into Scouts and we had a one-week summer camp that made it a lot easier to get some merit badges needed for Eagle, like the aquatic ones (swimming, life-saving, canoeing, etc.).  I did that for the next few years instead.   The conditions were a lot more primitive, which had pros and cons, but the one-week term was more suited to my taste.  

    Scouts was very much like a team sport (and also a bit like a frat, as well).  I had a lot of friends that continued at Longhorn, then Kanakuk because football not creepy Christians and molestation, and some girls that were Mystic and Waldemar.  It was definitely a thing, but not quite as cultish/cliquish as maybe it became.

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  2. Just now, Texas Fight said:

    If the camp is square in the flood plain, I assume the cabins are flooded all of the time. The family has owned it since 1976. Anyone know how often these buildings were flooded?

    Family has owned it a lot longer than that.  Camp was originally founded in the 20s by a UT football coach, "Doc" Stewart, along with Camp Stewart for boys.  Both foundered during the depression and were bought by others.  The predecessors to the Eastland family bought Mystic.

    But yeah, on the one hand, they had to have been "on notice" of potential flooding.  On the other, they seem to have avoided catastrophe in the past.

    That TM article indicated that Mystic, at least, had become quite lucrative in operation, let alone the land value.  I'm curious if that is true of the other camps down there.  As part of the increase in value, there was a bit of sophistication in the ownership structure to avoid liability and tax consequences.  Apparently, unfortunately, not enough disaster prevention, though.

  3. 5 hours ago, pyrohornIII said:

    I went to MO several times in the mid 70s.  Brisket can correct me, but I remember it being a retreat for Marathon Oil?  Some oil company or another.  It was a great camp compared to the scout camps I attended.  They have this old water slide there that was super fun.  There's a video of it attached.  But when we used it, there were no walls on either side.  The pain in the ass was hauling that wooden luge thing back up, so the second year we brought some rope, a pulley and some barbell weights. We used that to pull the cart back up the track instead of lugging it.  worked pretty well.  

    That was a really fun and clean camp.  All presbyterian run, and they were even laxer than the methodists at that time.  Always made sure I went along on those trips if i could.

     

    Pretty sure the history of it is a family named Morris has a ranch down there, that still exists.  They donated part of it to the Presbyterian Church some years ago and it operates as a retreat center and summer camp for Presbyterians, mostly.  I think it can be rented out by others.

  4. 16 minutes ago, Bevo said:


    I’m not in Texas currently and only know about this through this thread. Who are the Easterlands and Ragsdales? I know a Lowry Ragsdale form Houston Memorial who I think only has a son, Hunter.

    The Eastlands are the family that owns Mystic.  Ragsdale family owned Camp Stewart and Heart O The Hills. Both lost their camp directors and family members in the flood.

    Note that these camps (not Stewart) and La Junta are all along the South Fork of the GuadAlupe along Highway 39 within a few miles of each other.  While there was flooding all over the place, it seems it was particularly bad there.

  5. 4 hours ago, tx 3 putt said:

    well damn ....

     

    It didn't make the list of real bad ones, but in late June or early July of 1977, after my parents picked me up at Camp Longhorn, we went to SA and were staying at La Mansion and the Riverwalk was seriously flooded so that the first floor of the hotel was starting to be awash.

    Watching the river rush by from our second or third floor balcony was something I still remember.

  6. As has been pointed out, there's a lot of "virtue-signalling" surrounding prayer these days. And I don't think Jesus would approve.  I bet if you looked at the history of Christianity, you'd find public declarations of "I'll pray for you" and "We should pray for them" outside of a church service or function to be rare.  I'm guessing this became popular during the era of tent revivals and such.

    And, I might need to elaborate on "the next right thing."  For some that may sound like you're asking for help on whether or not to eat those klobasniki in the work fridge or some dumb "moral" question like that.  And, at some level, it might be, especially for the newb, or the young.

    But it's a meditation on what's going on in your life and those around you, what's good (gratitude), what's bad and you need help with.  And when you do it, things sometimes come to you that might not otherwise when you're all torqued up about something, you start finding you have a clarity that you didn't before.  If nothing else, it helps keep you from just moving from one emergency or shitshow to another.

    Now, whether that is prayer to a divinity, or just meditation or reflection, a divine intervention, or just maximally good use of the human mind and body is a question I leave up to you.  But damned if it doesn't work for a lot of folks.

  7. 6 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:


    I was on the board at Mo for several years, including when Tim was camp director (he left for a while, then we brought him back as president).
    We’d experienced minor (but still scary) flooding in the past, and there have also been fires in the area.
    As a board, we spent some time - not a lot, it didn’t take a lot - on disaster planning. What do we do if the ranch gets cut off by a fire? What do we do if there’s a flood? Even “what do we do if there’s a medical emergency here in the sticks?” BTW, we signed a contract with a medical evacuation chopper service for the last one. It’s saved at least one life from what I understand.
    And Tim is damned good at what he does, he’s a real pro. So, yeah, there are ways to do disaster planning at such facilities right. There’s no way to be ready for everything, but you need to have a good team and empower them to take action.

    I don't want to unnecessarily shit on Mystic ownership/management, by most accounts they were pretty good at running a camp for a long time.

    But, from that TM article, they might have gotten a little full of themselves over the recent years and complacent.

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  8. 2 minutes ago, wild_turkey said:

     


    Thanks, Twice. I always appreciate your posts on everything.

    Regarding the bolded part, and I’ve seen a couple of similar explanations, would you say prayer could be treated more as meditation or a coping mechanism? A way of personally processing life’s hardships?

    If a person firmly believes their version of God exists, then someone is listening, even if the response to prayer is unclear. If a person doesn’t believe in God, then people who pray are basically talking to themselves, but at least it helps them feel better or less alone in the world. I’m probably in the latter camp at this point but I can kinda understand the former camp even if I disagree.

    Is that fair or completely off base?

    Although, my perception is that a significant percentage of Christians believe that prayer can effect actual results, which is ludicrous to me for reasons mentioned in my first post. So I still don’t and possibly never will understand that group, and that’s where I get borderline angry when people are told that prayer will help a tragedy.

     

    Absolutely.  I can't claim to understand it really.  I was raised Methodist and wasn't taught much of the outrageous shit you got from the fundamentalists. Hell, I took sex Ed at church for fucks sake.  It was overall a pretty positive experience.

    Even so, I fell away from it as many or most do.  But came back to a spirituality through recovery from alcoholism through AA.  As is known, it is a program founded on "religious" principles, but the founders, despite using "God" and letting religion infiltrate it, also distilled it into basic principles common to most world religions that can be and are called just basic "spirituality," or "getting in touch with the universe" or pick your metaphysical metaphor, or God or Allah or Buddha or whatever.  For me, personally, the whole Christian God thing is just easier to wrap my head around than some of the other new-agey things it could be called.

    So, looking back, I see a whole lot of the positives even in the church-raising I received, in what I consider one of the more intelligent denominations and although at a mighty-whitey church, was blessed with excellent, intelligent, insightful and compassionate clergy.

    But yeah, prayer or meditation is "getting right with the world."  And that isn't praying for outcomes or prosperity, but for the strength and understanding to endure whatever it is we are confronted with.  And as alluded to earlier, that really often takes the form of "what do I do next, what is the next right thing"?

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  9. 2 hours ago, Willfully Horn said:

    A friend worked as a hospice nurse. She claimed that religious patients generally had an easier passing than non-religious types. I think calls for prayers are meant to assuage, not to affect change.

    That, as alluded to above, is the mature view of it.

  10. 16 minutes ago, Brian Fantana said:

    Hyperbole, not a joke. I went to one of these camps for 5 years, there is absolutely no way you could have evacuated everyone without a better emergency warning system in place. The existing one is a joke and doesn't tell you shit. They aren't going to evacuate a whole camp full of people based on it is what I was trying to say.

    Well, one thing, Cypress Lake, no more than a mile down the road, seems to have been undamaged or at least no injuries/fatalities.  Chopper found the FEMA map and it's entirely out of the floodplain, while Guadelupe is square in it.  The evacuation didn't have to be into town or whatever, just to higher ground.  

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  11. 1 hour ago, 956 Worldwide said:

    The natural response is always to prod the pros to do things better. And I want to be clear that I am a huge advocate of the NWS and NOAA and am furious at their defunding, and the DOGE massacres.  That absolutely has to be part of the post-op.

    But the fact is that user error is usually at fault and that’s where the deep probing needs to happen.  Weather forecasting is always inexact and you will never have a system that can’t be ignored. 

     

    The tough questions are going to be on the camp side. Questions like: who monitored weather and emergency alerts and how? What was the plan in place if you had gotten advance warning in time? How often did you practice that plan? What staff members knew the plan? What did the campers know about the plan? Was it activated? How far along did you get?

    I have a suspicion that the breakdown was around the first and second question. Maybe I’m wrong.  

    I think you are mostly right.

    But those camps are also a fixture down there and probably the highest-population-density areas outside Kerrville proper for 50-60 miles in any direction.

    It prompts the question why local officials didn't get off their asses, call all the camps, or hell, stop by, and say, "hey, you know what's going on with the weather, right?  Do you have a plan?  If not, let's make one right now."

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  12. 2 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

    What?  Forecasting at best is an inexact science, and they have been recently handcuffed in terms of personnel.  Issuing appropriate warnings but predicting rainfall on the low side is hardly "fault".  Jesus Christ.

    I give that poster a break, there's a lot of (mis)information floating about, including a narrative that the denuded NWS fucked the dog.

    As much as I'd like to blame the whole mess on Trump, Elmo, and DOGE, NWS' performance is a testament to the civil servants that work there (present and past), who got their job done, despite adverse conditions.

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  13. 2 minutes ago, pyrohornIII said:

    But isn't that part of the Great we are in such a hurry to recapture?  

    I'm still on this bandwagon.  While NWS is at fault, they don't have near the responsiblity in all this that the county does.  I am betting there will be lawsuits that flesh that out.  Unfortunately so many of these officials are protected from personal loss due to tort reform, leaving them with something akin to qualified immunity.  While it was put into place to protect sincere good samaritans, it's been bastardized to protect those who make shitty decisions about service to people based on re-election bids. 

    I live in a community that used to have a wide variety of amenities and services.  Over the past two decades I have watched the bulk of those disappear.  The move was to first underfund the amenities and let them fall into such disrepair people could not use them.  Next obvious step was to do away with them all together, because no one is using them anymore, right?    And in doing so they could keep their maintenance fees low and everything went into the golf course and landing strip.    We have seen the same thing in our state govt.  And trump is doing the same with his dumbass DOGE stuff.  Musk is gone, but you don't see Trump scrambling to repair all the damage he did.  Nope. And too many sit there and cheer this on.   They have made the taxpayers of Kerrville or wherever seem like logical people when they refuse to pay for things of public safety.   

    What they don't see is how many of their businesses rely on the tourist/camp visitors who will now be gunshy about coming to their county and choose to spend that money in a place that doesn't have such a deadly reputation.    

    But in the end, those county commissioners are at fault here.  They should have done better.  

     

    It's part of your energy bill every month.  I know mine is at least $50 more every month than before.  

     

    Something else I bet happens.  Trump miraculously finds some FEMA money for Texas, due to the fact that if Texas goes blue, so does the rest of the country, electorally.  No FEMA for this will be huge...and we haven't even gotten into hurricane season properly yet. 

    I don't see NWS being at fault hardly at all, even with the cuts, they warned of "life-threatening flooding" about an hour before it took place.

    Seems like everything downstream of NWS and local is at major fault for not seeing that NWS' message was distributed where it mattered and not reacting with sufficient urgency.

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  14. 12 minutes ago, Rip76 said:

    I consider myself a believer, and I’m still in search of where I want to land so to speak.

    I’ve always believed that God lets things happen.  It’s just how I’ve always thought.  I believe mainly that prayer is for you and me to feel closer to God.
    I don’t know if I believe that prayer has ever prevented or helped an outcome.
     

    Yeah, the concept of original sin isn't so much banal evil as being apart from God.  Which basically means God lets shit happen, and if you want divine help, you must seek it.  And that doesn't mean a new McMansion and a BMW in the driveway, but being able to deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, which is often as simple and as complex as just doing the next right thing, whatever that may be.

    So, prayer is often an after-the-fact thing in that something terrible has happened, how do I deal with it.  But if you are prayerful, or for the non-believer, spiritual, constant contact with your divinity, while it doesn't prevent disasters, seems to help avoid them somehow.

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  15. 1 minute ago, chainsaw said:

    That Texas Monthly story (which goes in depth into those figures and ends with a bitter intra-family lawsuit over a financial mess) paints a picture of an extremely exclusive place for the Country Club crowd, and the article does indicate that the "in your face" Bible programming was put there by the new management.

    Well, it does say 76, which was pretty prime time for my cohort, even a tad early.  But I suspect it got more "strenuous" as time passed.

    And, it wasn't really exclusive in terms of being extraordinarily expensive or hard to get into until fairly recently (there seems to have been a camp explosion as Longhorn has added still a third camp).

    In fact, Waldemar was considered the fancy-pants girls camp probably for most of their co-existence.

    But, it's like everything else in wealth-inequality asset-explosion land, it has become more exclusive over time.

  16. 4 hours ago, David Dennison said:

     I just never remember hearing it described as such growing up, that's all. But we're talking 40 years ago.

    Yeah same and I knew a lot of Mystic campers, a guy who worked there summers in HS, and some family friends were close to what apparently were the earlier generations of camp ownership.

    The whole Christian thing, besides a kind of nominal thing, seems to be a latter-day development.  Which pretty much makes sense.

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  17. 10 hours ago, royiv said:

    Your wife is the type of clergy that I would love to have dinner with over multiple bottles of wine discussing how we got to this place. I bailed, but I commend her for keeping the faith in a world where Christianity has become hijacked by political terrorists.

    Intelligent, educated clergy are amazing companions and friends.

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  18. 16 minutes ago, Captainant said:

    More just hopeful that one day you'll realize your analytical legal mind is getting led around by the nose by the fascists. Their entire game is to turn shields into swords and disseminate disinformation, and you only ever seem to tut-tut the forces working against that, for fear of being "just as bad as the fascists". 

    How about you start paying attention to outcomes instead of procedure? I know that the fascists are hoping we all just stop worrying about outcomes and just get twisted over complying with bullshit rules of decorum and evidence that they're planning to break anyways. 

    I am paying attention to outcomes.  The truth is out about Mamdani and his unfortunate, but probably not uncommon privileged gaming of affirmative action.

    That's really the end of the story on that topic.

    The other topic is NYT's ethics in taking information from a piece of shit like Jordan Lasker, which is unfortunate, but actually tut tutting.

    Also ironic that you would pick this particular subtopic to talk about outcomes versus processes.

  19. 1 hour ago, Captainant said:

    Good One Lol GIF by Justin

    The 4th amendment that has protecting due process for all people? That thing that is being shredded as we speak by Roberts and the very fine supreme court?

    It truly is breathtaking how happily and readily you apply different standards to fascists and those who stand against them. 

    Geezus Christ.

    We're talking about a specific instance of bad facts from a bad source.  Generalizing, the 4th Amendment in a criminal case is one of the few instances where we concern ourselves with the source of facts and will suppress them when the source or process that led to their discovery is tainted.

    We're not talking about court generally, or fascists generally, just Jordan Lasker. We're talking about facts and whether and how they should be used when they come from a tainted source.

    You will find any fucking excuse to twist what I say into support for fascists.

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  20. 9 hours ago, chainsaw said:

    Yes it's horrible to see this "factual information" suppressed by getting published in the most widely circulated newspaper in the nation.

    Right it hasn't been suppressed.  But that seems to be what people are arguing for?  It came from a piece of shit so it should be ignored despite its truth.

  21. 46 minutes ago, chainsaw said:

    People want affordability. Nobody cared that he opposes Israel's genocide, and they won't care how he filled out an online form when he was 17

    I'm not touching on the merits or demerits of Zohran Mamdani.  Just that this is a bit of an issue.  Bit doing some heavy lifting.

    It's intriguing to me for a couple of reasons.  While I am now fully of the mind that programs that advantage minorities are justified, affirmative action in the employment and education admissions contexts have often troubled me, because it comes closer to a zero-sum game than most other contexts.  And when you get to problematic attempts to "game the system" (if in fact that's what this is, you can have an interesting argument on that point alone) like this, the problem is underscored.

    The other thing here is suppressing factual information because it is a) disadvantageous and b) comes from an extremely distasteful source is extremely problematic.  Another sticky wicket in the First Amendment/Free Expression argument.  Although I submit it's not really a sticky wicket at all.  To the extent truthiness can be determined, let it out.

    So, I can't disagree with NYTs decision to report this, but how they reported it may be a different matter.  Funny thing, this factual reporting but with a tinge or spin on some related or background issue is what conservatards point to as lying in the media, while conservative media abandons fact altogether.

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  22. 5 hours ago, Pato del Muerto said:

    So who is modifying the weather, per her research?  Let me know who to be upset with, Marge!

    The woke-ass NOAA had to put this up while Florida was doing its little spasm.  Pretty comprehensive about all the chemtrail, space laser and other weather mod conspiracies out there.

    https://www.noaa.gov/news/fact-check-debunking-weather-modification-claims

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