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TwiceHorn

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Everything posted by TwiceHorn

  1. 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.
  2. Right, should have looked and, Moran was the family behind Conoco so there was an oil company connection. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/mo-ranch
  3. 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. 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. 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. 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.
  8. Gunther Eagleman can lick my balls though.
  9. 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"?
  10. That, as alluded to above, is the mature view of it.
  11. 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.
  12. 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."
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. Intelligent, educated clergy are amazing companions and friends.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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
  24. My main concern is that the Lasker information is, apparently, true. So, that's a bit of a problem for Mamdani. A separate issue is NYT reporting it while calling Lasker an academic opposed to affirmative action. While that is literally true, it's a pretty horrendous minimization of him. Some other fun tidbits. Lasker is a PhD candidate at Tceh, but that is one well-hidden fact. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordan-l-b84457304?trk=people-guest_people_search-card He's also speaking at a "Natalist" conference held on the UT campus at the ATT Conference Center. ATT apparently is just a hotel that anyone can book for just about anything but geezus. "Natalists" are white supremacist eugenicists.
  25. Um, that whole 4th Amendment thing? Speaking in this case about the checkered origin of the truth. And, again, had the procedures had the time to spin out, he'd be convicted on more than 34 counts.
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