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TwiceHorn

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Everything posted by TwiceHorn

  1. Yeah, he apparently learned his ratfucking lessons from Roy Cohn very well. He's almost as much a savant at that as self-promotion.
  2. Mystic is not a church camp, despite recent descriptions. It was founded, and its location selected, by UT football coach EJ Stewart.
  3. I mean, it's been 20 years. Were you alive? Paying attention? https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna9600878 That piece of shit Franklin Graham for one. Google "hurricane Katrina God's vengeance."
  4. Yeah I figured it was something like that. It's blown the fuck up over the last 50 years. Apparently so had Mystic. Seems like it's a big business now. Forty-fifty years ago, I thought it was more a labor of love.
  5. There were a not insignificant number of people, whose current political philosophies you can now guess, that said Katrina was God's vengeance on the dirty darkies and den of iniquity that was NO.
  6. Mystic may have become a little more "Christy," but historically is right in line with Stewart and Rio Vista. Historically, they're slightly more "traditional," horsey archery riflery camps, while your Longhorns and Champions are more aquatic. I think Longhorn created "Ranch Branch" to try to attract those campers and now there's some third thing entirely.
  7. A whole hell of a lot of pilots are engineers. And I imagine many of those who aren't share a lot of thinking with engineers.
  8. I don't think it's actually difficult for them, they just have a tough time internalizing that "more likely than not" is adequate proof or evidence for anything serious. On the other hand, I think a lot of people have trouble internalizing what "beyond a reasonable doubt" coupled with the presumption of innocence means in a criminal matter. And I've been practicing law for 30 plus years and am not wholly sure what "clear and convincing evidence" is
  9. As has been pointed out, that was not an uncommon sentiment about Katrina, going the other way, but geezus.
  10. Yeah, that's fucking weird. Doesn't happen among the people I know.
  11. Didn't see this mentioned, but some minor Houston official made some scandalous and deeply offensive remarks on a TikTok (of course) about this disaster. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/houston/article/whitmire-sade-perkins-camp-mystic-20628967.php She made some valid points that have been acknowledged here, that if these girls were darker there would probably be less of an uproar and far fewer consequences. In comments on her post, there was the following:
  12. It's an interesting question. Recent tendency has been to blame Soviet communism, but that ignores what a complete shitshow Tsarist Russia was. It seems the very thing that made Russia ripe for the Bolshevik revolution, massive poverty and wealth-disparity, is exactly the thing that turned Soviet Russia into its own dictatorship where the people were mere pawns. The big answer seems to be that in Russia life has always been very cheap. In the context of Stalinism, Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon described it as a "vivisection morality," a willingness to experiment on live people that tends not to exist or to a lesser extent in other developed nations. And that seems to be the thing that is transcendent in Russian politics and society: their leaders are more willing to sacrifice a lot of life, and the populace to tolerate it, than other countries.
  13. NPR/PBS has balls of steel.
  14. Well, first off, summer camp answers the question wtf are the kids gonna do all summer, for at least part of it. So, if you have the means, it makes perfect sense. Then once you get to camp, it has the social aspects of any other elementary/middle school organized activity. Kids are capable of turning it into a greater or lesser shit show, as are their parents. Through the 70s and 80s, even at my ultra-privileged, ultra-white school, it was just something you did, guided in some cases by family tradition. It wasn't some status competition like sorority rush. That seems to be a more recent development that is sort of symptomatic or emblematic of further polarization and wealth and privilege concentration. Like, my friends that were close with what apparently was the prior generation of the Eastland family (owners of Mystic), were close because Mom grew up in Hunt on Highway 39, basically across the street from Mystic. She went to Tivy and Tech. Her husband was from Lamesa, for fucks sake. Granted, both families were well off, but solidly upper-middle not oligarchs.
  15. If anything, he looks like a bigger perv than Epstein there. Godalmighty.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. Gunther Eagleman can lick my balls though.
  25. 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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