Over 100 dead, and the toll is still climbing. The deadly floods in Texas swept through an area full of camping sites and Christian youth camps, and people died because they didn’t get any warnings.
The thing is, the counties involved had been discussing buying flood warning systems for years — a network of sensors that would set off sirens if the river waters were rising at a dangerous rate. That sound sensible to me. We’ve got tornado warning sirens all over where I live, and I’d be glad to get a noisy alert to wake me up if dangerous weather was bearing down on me. The Texas county commissioners were discussing this threat back in 2016.
COMMISSIONER BALDWIN: You know we had a baby flood a couple weeks ago, a month or so, whatever it was. And I keep hearing these reports of the old, old system, and I know we’re not going to deal with that though. Expect that to be gone where the Jones call the Smiths, and the Smiths call Camp Rio Vista, and Rio Vista blah, blah, blah, along down the line. But it’s still there and it still works. The thought of our beautiful Kerr County having these damn sirens going off in the middle of night, I’m going to have to start drinking again to put up with y’all.
Except it didn’t work. They didn’t install any sirens. What saved some people was that an old couple saw the rising waters and drove around honking their car horn.
But they debated this same thing in 2017, and again decided they didn’t want any “damn sirens.”
COMMISSIONER MOSER: So we’ve talked about, you know one of the things we said sirens and we said we don’t want sirens, too many many people said they did not want sirens when they had these — when we had these gatherings. Code Red, and I don’t know if Dub wants to chime in on this, but Code Red is the same that’s going to get information to a lot of people; not to everybody, okay. One of the things that we’ll do is identify a point of contact in all of the camps, we won’t communicate with everybody in the camp, but we have a point of contact at the camp so that they can disseminate people within — to people within the camp, like during the summer when kids are there, or to RV parks. Now, if the RV parks want to have a siren themself when something goes up that’s up to them. That’s not part of our thing. So getting the information to the public is the end item of this whole thing. The first thing is sense a flood, then communicate that information to the local authorities, to the right authorities, and then for them to have a system by with which to disseminate the information to the public.
In 2021, they argued some more. They had over $5 million in federal relief funds, but they didn’t want to spend Biden’s money. So they did nothing.
Resident: Are you accountable to anyone for how you spend it? Or is it a, kind of, a reward and shows your support for this particular program? It’s not free money. Being present as we talk. How do we know this? Immediately. Unless you want it on the COVID lies and vaccination pressure, you have to send it back. Those are heavy strings. And those are strings. The deep state harangue and vilified President Trump for calling COVID for what it was and then suggest responses that were non-draconian, and then when Biden took office, the leftist government took its gloves off. It has lied and lied more about this COVID — about COVID.
The temptation is great, you’re accountable, and we would like to know where your allegiance is.
Resident 2: And I’m here to ask this Court today to send this money back to the Biden administration, which I consider to be the most criminal treasonous communist government ever to hold the White House. And Kerr County should not be accepting anything from these people. They’re currently facilitating an invasion of our border, and we’re going to support these people? So that’s what I have to say. Thank you.
Resident: I happen to know that there is no such thing as free money. It’s never government-funded; it’s tax-payer funded. So they’re taking our money and they’re putting strings attached to it and then they’re giving it back to us. And they’re going to get their foot in the door in this county. We don’t want their money. I feel like the people have spoken and I stand with the people. Thank you for your time.
I think we can all see how the right wing has poisoned the minds of the people. The Biden administration was the most criminal treasonous communist government ever to hold the White House
? These people are demented and delusional.
So the county decided to hang on to the money (sending it back might mean New York or California would use it!) and dawdled and refused to do the simplest, most sensible thing.
JUDGE KELLY: And GrantWorks has been very helpful in — in getting us focused on what colors between the lines and what doesn’t. As of last Thursday, when I got a call from Bonnie White telling me about this — the problem that y’all were going to present at the meeting, I went and got on the telephone to their Senior Vice President from GrantWorks. And there — there are discussions that they want to have with us and so we want to sit down and listen to them. And we want — we want you to hear them, too. Because you’re the public. But we — we need to know and get very comfortable with where we are with this grant before we start taking that money. And the claw back was the first thing. As far as where that money sits for the next year or two, my old law partner John Cornyn tells me that if we send it back it’s going to New Jersey or it’s going to New York or it’s going to —
MRS. LAVENDER: Or California.
JUDGE KELLY: — or California. And so I don’t know if I’d rather be the custodian of the money until we decide what we have to do with it rather than giving it back to the government to spend it on values that we in Kerr County don’t agree with. So —
COMMISSIONER BELEW: And any spending of it would have to be done in Commissioners’ Court so you’ll be able to see it and know it.
You might be wondering what Texas senator Ted Cruz was doing. You can guess. He was doing what he always does in the face of disaster.
Ted Cruz has had quite a week. On Tuesday, the Texas senator ensured the Republican spending bill slashed funding for weather forecasting, only to then go on vacation to Greece while his state was hit by deadly flooding, a disaster critics say was worsened by cuts to forecasting.
Cruz, who infamously fled Texas for Cancun when a crippling winter storm ravaged his state in 2021, was seen visiting the Parthenon in Athens with his wife, Heidi, on Saturday, a day after a flash flood along the Guadalupe River in central Texas killed more than 100 people, including dozens of children and counselors at a camp.
This would be an appropriate place to cite a face-eating leopard meme, but I just can’t do it. At least 28 children, innocently enjoying a weekend with other kids, many in Christian-run church camps, drowned in these floods, all because their guardians didn’t want sirens disturbing their sleep, didn’t want to spend money from a criminal treasonous communist government
, and they just wanted to hoard money to prevent it from going to California or New York (which they probably also believe are communist states).
Many of those kids were attending Camp Mystic, a Christian all-girls’ summer camp. That one camp lost 27 campers and counsellors. I can’t imagine sending a child to a fun-filled summer camp only to get word later that their body had been fished up out of roiling flood waters, that they’d died in fear and pain, all because some Texas assholes (pardon the redundancy) had refused to make camps on a river with a reputation for flash floods safe.
Parents, you can come pick up your kids’ camping gear. They won’t need it anymore.
I can’t wait for the US to split up. I don’t want to be part of the same country as Texas.
“they just wanted to hoard money to prevent it from going to California or New York (which they probably also believe are communist states” – because this actually ever happens, instead of NY and California funding the relief, via taxes, of every other state, including Texas… But, yeah, of course they would think this.
the sirens weren’t going to go off in the middle of every night.
they’d just go off for a fucking emergency.
they don’t want their sleep interrupted by a siren that is warning them of a fucking emergency?
It was clearly shown that the weather service issued accurate warnings 12 hours before the flooding occurred. It’s just that nobody reacted, or, you know, acted. Whether this is political negligence or Phillippines-style “what will happen, will happen”, I have no idea.
I occasionally check out Fox just to see what the other side is thinking. The comments there are revealing. They’re thrilled Trump has declared a disaster and is releasing federal funds. This is a natural disaster, don’t ya know, nothing like that Palisades fire which was mostly the result of “blue state” mismanagement. And, FEMA is on the scene! That’s right, the same FEMA Trump has cut, with the loss of over 2,000 employees and a freeze on funding for local disaster preparedness projects. And shame on all those heartless Dems who are politicizing this tragedy. MAGA world would never do such an evil thing. (https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trumps-track-record-disaster-misinformation-casts-blame-california/story?id=117547205)
@ ^ John Watts : Yup. It is as predictable as it is infuriating – in both cases extremely so.
@3. Robbo :“they don’t want their sleep interrupted by a siren that is warning them of a fucking emergency?”
Yes, well, of course!
Saving lives is horribly inconvenient especially when there’s a nightmarish chance there might be a false alarm and you have to get up out of bed once in long time when you could’ve just stayed asleep! gasp, horor , you might have to wake up to things when you didn’t have to!
Far better to risk the scientifically increasingly likely chance of a mere massive catastrophe claiming tens or hundreds of lives (or more) and the mild inconvenience of the resultant stench of dead bodies and messy time-consuming clean up and the potential mild risk of personal guilt* for being, well, y’know personally culpable for the deaths of many of your constituents and destruction of so much of your local area,property, history, livestock, etc..
.* Admittedly that risk seems to be nil for far too many Repug sociopaths.
/Does this really need a sarc tag?
We know who’s responsible for this horrible disaster. Taco Cheeto has spoken the magic incantation: “It’s Biden’s fault.”
Why the fuck are there camps on the floodplain of a river notorious for flash floods at all?
@ ^ KG : Cheap land prices, lax regulations on what to do with it* & sufficient unthinking suckers that don’t care or think enough to object?
Yay! No “Red or Green Tape, think what we can do. Just like Dickensian London!!!1ty! (Except toknow about that you’d need to read or know history and, yeah..
@9 KG
Because putting a campsite next to a river is fun. They neglected to consider the fact that they built a sacrificial altar to an evil god, and god hates Texas.
That’s a good question. Cheap land that no one would want build on, low capital costs (these are hotels, they’re cheap cabins for kids who are “camping”), little regulatory oversight, and a warehousing/herding mentality. They bring in one herd for a week, maybe two, get their money, than shuffle them out for the next herd to come in, all while wrapping themselves in the piety of a Christian camp.
I stayed at one of those when I was in 6th grade. “Rudimentary” is the kindest word I could use for them. No running water or other facilities in the cabins, a couple of bare bones shower cabins, and a central cook cabin with power and water. Rent Friday the 13th, the 1980 slasher movie, which accurately shows what these spaces are like.
Usually sans slasher, but in Texas they have the weather to murder kids.
Over the weekend I wound up blocking quite a few people on Bluesky for making sickening callous responses to this tragedy. Many were left-liberal types who thought Texans were getting their just deserts. Not cool.
It does show the importance of forecasting and not cutting funding of NWS. Plus the local political shenanigans over a warning system PZ highlights. I feel in a similar boat living in Florida as peak hurricane season approaches. People will cheer for storms to bullseye Florida as they always do.
This flooding did remind me of a vague reference in Cormac McCarhy’s No Country for Old Men about a tragic event in 1965. Maybe this…Sanderson TX flood:
https://www.newswest9.com/article/news/local/survivors-residents-remember-sanderson-flood-of-1965-50-years-later/513-eae8a65e-71e0-4fd2-b61a-73b1a80c11c6
https://texasarchive.org/2011_03910
Cancun Ted Cruz is the worst!
What the Texas officials and the GOP are now doing is…trying to blame the National Weather Service.
Which despite being short staffed due to GOP layoffs, did a good job of warning the county that…there was a major Flash Flood Emergency.
They did exactly what they were supposed to do.
In fact, they started issuing warnings and watches two days before the flood occurred.
They issed a Flash Flood Emergency, three hours before the Guadalope river started rising.
The local officials just ignored them.
They didn’t have much in the way of mechanisms in place to transfer the warnings from the National Weather Service to the people living along the river.
The fault is entirely the Texas GOP government in general and the local GOP government in particular.
Here is a partial history of the NWS warnings.
They started on July 2, two days before the flood.
“At 3:06 a.m. the National Weather Service Austin/San Antonio posted on X: “A very dangerous flash flooding event is ongoing.” It ended: “Turn Around, Don’t Drown!”
The plain truth is that the wacko right wingnuts who run Texas are incompetent and dropped the ball.
This Guadalupe river valley has a long history of flash flooding due to climate and geology and is known to be one of the most dangerous valleys in the USA.
.1. One children’s camp did manage to evacuate.
They had a few adults who were paying attention and made the simple decision to…avoid the rising river.
That the Mystic camp children didn’t have cell phones is a red herring.
The staff and leaders of this campe were older children and adults and I’m sure they had a few cell phones here and there. If for no other reason than to summon help in emergencies, i.e. police, fire, ambulance.
.2. There was another small town on that river that did have an emergency siren set up, called Comfort.
The whole system cost $60,000.
They paid attention to what was going on and set off the siren when it looked like it was a…Flash Flood event.
None of their residents were killed.
I’ve heard the usual, “no one saw this coming” excuse.
Except that the National Weather Service and numerous people in the area did in fact, see it coming far enough ahead to not get killed.
I don’t know about the rest of the US of A, but these kind of camps are all over the South. They are often “Christian” which can mean that abuse is part of the learning experience.
When I was young in the early 50s, I could go spend a few weeks with my mom’s parents on the farm in southwest Georgia. That was fun, if boring…no TV. Sometimes some of my cousins…I had a lot of cousins…would be around to play with. My mom’s baby sister was still in school. I did get to pick cotton a little, and they gave me $100 for it. There were boiled peanuts and watermelon to eat. In the early evenings we would walk down to the cow pond so granddaddy could fish. We could go to Ralph’s store and get Moon Pies and chocolate sodas. Later, my grandparents weren’t able to take care of the kids plus I was old enough to stay at home alone while my folks were at work so I stopped doing that.
I think a lot of people had this idea that a week or two in the country like that would be good for the kids but they were removed from the farm culture so they had to find alternatives. Just as churches set up schools to indoctrinate the kids, they set up camps out of town to give them some of that outdoorsy experience…and indoctrinate them, and perhaps abuse them. Not in the slasher movie kind of way, of course, but psychologically abusive none the less.
When my wife was young a friend convinced her to go to an evangelical camp in Oklahoma. It got so abusive she had to sneak a call to her mom to rescue her.
Tangential but meanwhile in India :
Source : https://kknlive.com/en/himachal-pradesh-en/himachal-pradesh-flood-disaster-78-dead-over-50-rain-related/
Gather the Texas death toll is over 90 now?
Of course, any needless, avoidable death anywhere is a tragedy and the end of so much for so many – not just the person lost.
Of course, its not a competition with a simple horrible scorecard abnd nor is India perfect..
Over one hundred lives lost now. Wikipedia :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2025_Central_Texas_floods#Casualties
Of course, cumulatively the death toll from Trump’s covid lackj of response didn’t make enough difference and the regular USA school shootings don’t make enough difference so ..
… some Texas assholes (pardon the redundancy) …
Hey now – not all assholes are Texan!
@ PZ Myers, #13
With the caveat that it’s horribly transphobic,* there is a movie that gives an even clearer picture of the experience simply titled Sleepaway Camp. It features a cast of actual kids (rather than 20-to-30 somethings acting like children) “enjoying” a very realistic (read: shitty) version of a typical summer camp, complete with an open child molester on staff that everyone knows about but is more concerned with covering it and all the other bad shit up than with protecting the kids.
A whole lot of people who went to anything like those camps as kids can relate to the protagonists’ misery, especially if they, like Angela, didn’t fit in. The terrible activities, the unpleasant conditions, the bullying campers, the many uncaring jerks on staff; the list goes on. So if you’re really curious about the experience and can stomach the bad stuff, that would be my recommendation.
Or you could rent Ernest Goes to Camp for a whole different kind of horror…
*I maintain that it’s possible to read the movie as being the story of a trans girl striking back at all the creeps who bully and abuse her for being trans if you turn your head and squint a little. I do this because A.) I enjoy warping the obvious and bigoted intent of the writers this way and B.) because the movie, in my opinion, is a superior example of the slasher subgenre. I’d even say it’s kind of fun, viewed that way.
Seriously though, the bigotry of it is really fucking horrific, blatant, and inexcusable. No one is required to accept my choice of reframing the story, and I wouldn’t blame anyone who chose to stay away. It’s also pretty brutal on the violence front, particularly given its more realistic portrayal of camp and the age of its cast.
Pierce R. Butler @ #22 — “…Hey now – not all assholes are Texan!” Indeed. There are plenty in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, etc…and yes, even in California. And not all Texans are assholes. I know several from work and they’re decent people. They are as flabbergasted as the rest of us at this pandemic of stupidity we are suffering with.
@14 Hemidactylus
@18 robro
I ran across some articles about this:
Houston mayor criticizes former member of city’s food insecurity board over racial comments about Camp Mystic
All the articles I have noticed are about how horrible it was to say this out loud. I have seen no articles verifying or denying that Camp Mystic is all-white.
These people are a mill stone around our civilization’s neck. Unless we find a way to sever the cord, they will drag us down into hell.
I remember reading about that mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. 26 people were shot to death by a maniac, with 20 of those deaths being kids aged 5 and 6 years old. At the time, I thought “at least this will get the Republican party to admit that disasters such as this have an obvious cause”.
I can’t see the obvious problems being recognized and addressed for this disaster. People who couldn’t care about the deaths from psychopaths with guns, are unlikely to develop compassion just because people are dying from climate ignorance. Even if 1,000 children die from a single avoidable disaster, it seems like half of the American voting public prioritize their cultish party affiliation over human lives. Of course, I’d love to be proven wrong, but I’m not holding my breath.
Reginald, I put that to the Bubblebot:
The claim that Camp Mystic is “all-white” has been widely circulated but remains unverified. Here’s a distilled summary of the situation:
🧾 The allegation:
– Former Houston official Sade Perkins described Camp Mystic as a “white-only girls’ Christian camp” in a viral TikTok, asserting that it lacked racial diversity and that media coverage was racially biased.
📣 Public response:
– Her comments sparked backlash from city officials, religious leaders, and the public. Houston Mayor John Whitmire called the remarks “deeply inappropriate” and confirmed Perkins would not be reappointed to any city board.
– The First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, where Perkins is affiliated, issued statements distancing themselves from her views.
🔍 Counterclaims:
– Multiple commenters, including former campers, stated that while Camp Mystic is predominantly white, it is not exclusively white. Some individuals of color have attended, contradicting the “whites-only” label.
📜 Camp history and ethos:
– Camp Mystic is a private Christian girls’ camp founded in 1926, with deep ties to prominent Texas families. It emphasizes spiritual growth and traditional camp activities.
🧭 Conclusion:
There is no official documentation confirming Camp Mystic enforces racial exclusion. The camp’s demographic makeup may reflect broader socioeconomic and cultural patterns, but the “all-white” claim remains anecdotal and contested.
“I’d rather be the custodian of the money…” Where da fuck is the 5 million Judge? Where the fuck is it?
Every elected official in Kerr County should be whipped within inches of their lives, tarred & feathered then deported to El Salvadorian prisons
Back in the 90’s I went to one of the camps in this area – a girls’ camp but not an explicitly Christian one.
To answer part of the question “why were these camps built in a floodplain” – my grandmother was one of the founders of the camp – many of these camps are more than 100 years old – it likely wasn’t a flood plain back then.
And at least at my camp the cabins were up a considerable hill from the river. The oldest campers were closest to the river, and the younger ones were much father away. (Youngest = 6 years old)
But maybe not enough of a hill to keep the closest cabins safe. (The camp I went to has since closed and relocated slightly under a different name.)
I’m not an Texan, but I had a good time those summers (mostly, teenage girls can be awful). Imagining that river that I swam in, that I canoed in, suddenly filling my flimsy cabin (that my mother had lived in as a teen) is horrifying down to my bones.
All of the Texans I know (obviously a subset) are horrified, terrified and furious at the officials who didn’t install the warning system, and who didn’t pass on the flash flood warnings. I know how people respond to “not all Texans”, but genuinely, not all Texans were against those sirens (obviously, otherwise they wouldn’t have been brought up over and over again). And those campers weren’t all from the Hill Country, or even from Texas.
Back in the 90’s, at my camp, there were campers from Mexico and counselors from Australia. There were even a smattering of us Damn Yankees.
Condemn the officials to the ends of the earth, but don’t assume that they represent all of the people who live there. (Isn’t that what we say about a lot of places all over the world with terrible governments?)
@ all
Its my understanding that there is supposed to be a specific emergency response rep, for the fed, whose job was to a) make sure the alerts all went out as needed, and b) people actually paid attention to them – which would likely include working with law enforcement, etc., to make sure the word got out. That position was “vacant”, thanks to prior cuts the hmm, let me thing – the national weather system, and its related agencies. Nah, that can’t be right, could it? Sigh… Combine that with Texass’ usual bullshit view about safety, which amounts to, “As long as we don’t inform the public about dangers, or potential hazards near the places they live, recreate, etc., we can pretend its someone else’s fault when floods kill children, or a fertilizer blows up, and other ‘inconveniences’.”
Basically, a key issue here is that you “need” those middle men, to make sure shit actually happens, even if someone does manage to press a button, to send out alerts. Weird, huh…
That doesn’t seem quite right — for example, here’s a description of the area (also maps):
https://www.statesman.com/story/news/state/2025/07/07/guadalupe-river-flood-why-where-begin-end-texas-flash-flood-alley-flooding-map-hill-country/84492295007/
I kinda doubt that the geology or meteorology has changed that much in the past 100 years
Here’s a map of the camp, in relation to the river, and a creek (Cypress Creek), which was undoubtedly also swollen by the flooding.
https://mapcarta.com/21702740/Map
The camp was ‘Christian’ but it seems more in the mainline liturgical tradition than the Southern Baptist tradition (for instance they had arrangements for Catholic children to go to Saturday evening mass and had a presumably Protestant communion service once per 4 week session).
My guess is that the Texas Hill country became a popular camp area starting in the days before air conditioning because the hills were cooler than the plains, and, it has been a family tradition for some since (this camp had been around for 99 years and some of the girls came from families where there mothers and grandmothers had gone to the camp).
The American Camp Association requires site-specific emergency plans for accreditation (https://www.acacamps.org/article/campline/emergency-preparedness). Note accreditation is voluntary and this camp was not ACA accredited as far as I can find (this does not mean it did not have emergency plans). Texas also licenses almost all summer camps, but, I’m not sure that the licensing requires good emergency plans (the camp is licensed). Having good plans and testing them are needed to minimize the danger when something does happen. This is one reason the sirens would be sounded on a regular basis (perhaps once every 6 months or once a year) though not in the middle of the night except in a real emergency.
“The camp was ‘Christian’ but it seems more in the mainline liturgical tradition than the Southern Baptist tradition”
Um, it was in the taking profit Christian tradition.
The religious premium.
($$$ in > $ out)
Akira MacKenzie: Who are “these people” I have no idea of whom you speak. It is probably best to be more specific.
I am sorry that so many people died in the floods. I hate to think of children dying and can only hope that whatever happened, happened quickly while they were still sleeping or half-awake. I grieve for them and their families.
However, this was not a natural disaster. It was a human-caused debacle, preventable, wasteful and thoroughly reprehensible., deserving of all the criticism that can be heaped upon it. I will criticize Republicans and the Trump administration and every person who voted for Trump; and I will say I have no sympathy forthem, because that is the only way to honor the innocents who died.
https://www.epa.gov/environmental-economics/mortality-risk-valuation
“What is the “Value of a Statistical Life”?
The EPA does not place a dollar value on individual lives. Rather, when conducting a benefit-cost analysis of new environmental policies, the Agency uses estimates of how much people are willing to pay for small reductions in their risks of dying from adverse health conditions that may be caused by environmental pollution.
What value of statistical life does EPA use?
EPA recommends that the central estimate of $7.4 million ($2006), updated to the year of the analysis, be used in all benefits analyses that seek to quantify mortality risk reduction benefits regardless of the age, income, or other population characteristics of the affected population”
So, given the number of deaths in this event, any system would have had to cost more than $790m before that cost would have outweighed the computed benefits of reduced mortality
Why build a camp in a flood plain… Not the right question. The real question is, “Why have the camp open during the period its most likely to get flash floods?” Because, here is the thing, camps are built near lakes and rivers, kind of because of lakes and rivers. However, in “sane” places, those locations are closed down during the period of time that major flood events are likely to take place, not intentionally kept open during that time, and even if they where open they would f-ing have people paying attention to disaster alerts and with clear plans on how to deal with them, not, as rumored, some guy literally driving around honking a horn, because – again, no authorities, park rangers (probably also fired by the fed recently), or literally anyone else was out, doing the job of making sure people heard the alert, because no one was on the job making sure this was even taking place.
All around a shit show, even without the “new” EPA’s GOP based, “But it costs too much to do anything, so we didn’t.” I am sure that, maybe, some similar page kind of existed prior, since yeah, it never had unlimited money, so did have to make assessments as to what to prioritize, but it seems unlikely that it just flat out ignored everything else before, instead of at least trying to do something about less “costly” cases, by recognizing when they could be handled as part of a bigger issue. But, again, its the GOP running things now, so you are getting GOP logic.
For example, while Teflon is itself harmless, the EPA banned the use of a product called C-6, due to its health risks, so, because you still need something nearly identical to make Teflon, they tweaked it, and ironically made it worse, since its no not just toxic, but the body confuses it with fats, and will try to incorporate it into fat cells as “energy”, which it can’t then use. The new version was called Nexgen, or something like that. When questions started cropping up about that too they just tweaked the formula again. All of which would not be a huge issue, except that the freaking shit isn’t just used any more to produce Teflon in plants, its been repurposed for everything from stain resistance, including the coating used in Gortex suits, to fire fighting foam, to who the F knows. Its all poison, all dangerous, some of it actually worse than the original C-6, but “can you prove it, and can you get/let the EPA ban all of them, instead of playing wacka-mole? Nope, I am sure that, under Trump, its all been “deregulated” anyway, AND some idiot is now sitting in the crater that was once a working EPA, running numbers and going, “Well, its only killing the equivalent of $78 million of people (never mind its probably like $1b of people), based, of course, on the study done by a right wing think tank, who made up the numbers, so its totally fine!”
[I see Egnorance is instantiated]
Wow.. The idiot with the track back. Huge numbers of freaking “children” dying in a flood is NOT F-ING evolution. What, the ones that survived magically learned how to swim in flood waters? Grew wings and flew? What exactly has human stupidity, apathy, right wing ignorance, callous indifference to the wellbeing of the very people the state’s right wing government is supposed to serve, or any other damn thing about what happened, to do with “survival of the fittest”? Never mind that you Mind Matters’ writer has a very Christian apologist, and thus utterly stupid, understanding of what that means. They always do. Oh, and, of course, being a “good Christian”, he, and his website, has made absolutely sure that no one can post in reply, to argue their side, rebut his bullshit, or call him out as being a complete ass, who has no legitimate explanation for why his God’s excuse for it happening is in any way shape or form “better” (other than in his own sick, uncaring, mind).
Its not about morning them, its about giving enough of a shit, at all, to try to stop these sorts of things from happening in the first place. I.e., “making the world better”. Not making stupid excuses for why it is horrible, and that is all fine, because some god says so, and he wants it that way.
@37
That one is actually true. An elderly couple was getting alerts about the weather and drove around their camper/trailer campground honking the horn to wake people up as an ad hoc emergency warning.
https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/minnesota-natives-honk-horns-texas-campground-to-save-people-from-floodwaters/89-bca6ea35-989b-4a25-872d-7e9becc6ba72
The Trump regime issued an executive order to the EPA to freeze or drop all current environmental litigation.
https://www.afslaw.com/perspectives/environmental-law-advisor/trump-administration-freezes-all-environmental-litigation
Coming soon: Love Canal The Sequel
@33
As per CNN (US) the Mystic Camp actually teaches girls life skills, like how to change a flat tire, etc., in addition to the usual summer camp activities. (Link is CNN Anderson Cooper Instagram)
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DL6Hlp7qMou/
Some religious camps are more religion-oriented than others. While there is no shortage of horrific religious camps/retreats, enclaves, that doesn’t mean that all of them are.
@ 17
“Owning the libs” is more important than saving the lives of children if you are a red state political asshole. Remember, it’s immoral to have an abortion because all life is sacred. Unless there is a chance you could be awaked by an emergency siren. If you are a red state misogynist asshole, life begins at conception and ends at birth.
@18 I remember going to a maternal cousin’s farm for a few summers as a kid, which I count as some of the happiest times of my childhood. The cousin in question (an adult) was one of my favorite relatives–we got along really well because we both loved nature and animals. Mucking out stalls, feeding the horses and riding in the flatbed of his pickup truck are some of my fondest childhood memories.
“As per CNN (US) the Mystic Camp actually teaches girls life skills, like how to change a flat tire, etc., in addition to the usual summer camp activities.”
A shitload of praying. Yeah.
(https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/07/02/infinite-thread-xxxvi/#comment-2271239)
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But they are all, by fucking definition, religious.
No religious camps are atheistic.
How does language work, again?
Oh, right.
“Some religious camps are more horrific than others.”
(Can’t argue with that!)
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Gaw! Fucking religious apologists, like mushrooms they are!
Something additional I stumbled across — while it was known that the camp was on a flood plain, the owners got it exempted from flood plain maps:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/camp-mystic-appealed-to-remove-buildings-from-femas-100-year-flood-map-records-show
Hm. My previous post map might have been the new location, not the old one. Checking — no, I got it right. The new place is only a little south of the original. This has a map showing both locations:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/maps-texas-flash-flooding-camp-mystic/
The map text also notes that the victims’ cabins were at a lower elevation than the senior cabins.