Penta

I'm not allowed to have my views shifted by the thread?

Random nitpick: Mods, is there a way to have new post links in email take you directly to the new post, not the first page of the thread? Other than that: Am I the only one thinking we're having separate convos here? Kudu's beating the drum about the evils of the EDGE method and such, and the replies thereto, as one conversation, and the separate conversation about the achievability of becoming trained in necessary skills by an untrained adult. Seems to me it'd be less confusing were the former to be spun off into another thread, but eh. Moving on from that: The more I think about th

Huh, much more achievable.

Gentlemen, may I beg you to leave the spitballs for another thread? Beavah: If I were a bastard ACLU lawyer, I'd use a SE as a test case one day. It'd make for a fascinating trial...And I expect the court look at the current arrangements very curiously. The conflicts of interest would seem to make it practically impossible for SEs to fulfill their agency relationship with the councils. Excellent overview, my dam-building friend.

Holy. You guys rock. I post incoherently and sleep-deprived* and you guys still give me great info. *To explain: Most nights, I go to bed about midnight and get up at 6-7 AM. Except Sunday nights, lately...Because I have class at 8 AM and have had to get the paratransit bus at 5:30-6 AM, getting into school at 6-6:30 AM, I tend to just forget about sleeping on Sunday nights, opting more for lights-off laying-in-bed and keeping myself awake, so I don't oversleep. So by the time I've written these Monday morning posts, I'm on 24 hours between sleep. Re the Corporate stuff, Charter

Hit send too early. Re the international bit - I think I spoke poorly there...In fact, I'm certain I did. I wasn't speaking specifically, I was speaking generally. Scouting tends to lean somewhat conservative (around here, anyway), whereas support for international organizations tends to be a more politically liberal view...Which makes for something of an odd juxtaposition, or at least it did at 6 AM when I was thinking about this.

Ah, that answers the form and similar questions...I was wondering exactly that, which bit of the tax code it lives under. Hm.

Maybe this doesn't belong in Open Discussion - Program; I'll let the mods decide, but for lack of a more general forum, I'm putting it here. --- Like I promised in the other thread, I'm keeping each week's musings to a separate thread. These Monday mornings where I need to kill time look likely to happen all semester, so I figured I'd warn everybody up front. (No, I can't really study, before you ask. There's no good place to curl up with a textbook.) It's been a weird weekend for me, IRL. Participating in this forum brings back a lot of memories of my days as a Cub Scout, and e

Am I the only one thinking the whole "What Wood Badge is"/"What modern Scouting is" discussion probably deserves its own thread by this point? Actually, on that latter point... I think sometimes that's what we see here but that nobody totally likes to admit. Scouting, in the United States in 2010, is in many ways a different animal from the Scouting of 50 or 75 or 100 years previous. Really, Scouting after the 1960s and Scouting during and before the 1960s seem like very different things. Simply by the fact that Scouting is a more diverse movement in many ways, it's a different

Bart: As UCEagle says, Summit was gifted property, like Philmont was (technically, BSA bought it - but every cost of purchase, all $50 million, was covered by the Bechtel family). That's the prime reason it was taken up, I bet - they were getting it for free. Additionally, former military bases are a very bad idea these days for a few reasons: 1. Environmental remediation: It's a big problem these days - there isn't a base that's been closed that would not require major measures taken to clean it up. Yes, this would ordinarily be done by the service that's closing the base, but

We've gotten a bit more philosophical and such than I think is necessarily a good thing. (Yes, I'm also trying to take the heat out of the budding flamewars.) Allow me to nudge the conversation slightly by bringing up stuff you'd think people would learn in Scouting, but never seem to. My list of Skills I Wish Scouting Teaches Or Had Taught, linked directly to their usability in Scouting. If I use military terminology, it's because in writing fiction lately I've had to immerse myself in that, and it's what's familiar to me. These are skills that might already *be* taught by Scouting,

Totally agreed, NJCS. It wasn't til I came to this site that it struck me how much adults pour into Scouting, just to make a basic program work. I think, frankly, the controversy is a good thing - Questioning the volunteer aspect of Scouting is questioning a pretty fundamental aspect of adult participation in the movement. The fact that I was not immediately run off with pitchforks and torches for doing so says many good things, particularly about the posters here.

Thank you for correcting my art attempt, Kudu. Thanks for the reference on the tents. Hm.

Scoutfish, how did you get into my mind and express my thoughts better than I'm expressing them? Seriously. While I brought up precedent earlier, and I still believe that to be enough to say "No, don't bring it up at the EBOR"...Scoutfish is right. I'm the outsider here, and conscious enough of that to be cautious in my words...But something about this, oldsm, triggers alarm bells. Yes, 17/18 year olds can lie. I don't believe that being legally a minor grants the boy any special claim to truth. Yes, the kid wasn't removed. But you said it yourself: "My back-channel sources are

When you lay it out like that, I see where the situation is way more confusing than I first thought. Hm. I also missed that he was 17/18. My fear is precedent - I don't really think a BOR, particularly an EBOR, is at all the place to bring up something so personal, particularly not to "ambush" the Scout. It also sets a bad precedent in other regards, too. Yes, any abuse situation is pretty much a he said-she said situation almost by definition. But what if the Scout was younger than 17/18? What if he was 12, 13, 14? My fear is that once you set the precedent, it'll be used against younger

Ah, yes, the SEA LION Black Book. Seems the SS thought Boy Scouts were trained spies. Shades of the movie "Red Dawn" there.

Hm. Let me see if I have you right, Kudu... Using numbers for each of 4 patrols and S for the Scoutmaster and any other adults, let me try to sketch out in ASCII art what you described looks like. Each line is 100 feet. 1 /| 2-S-4 \|/ 3 Right? Wrong? [Edit: Uh, that comes out better in the text box than in preview. Imagine a circular/diamond-y shape...thing...] The notion of 1 tent per 6-8 boys is sort of odd, to me. Wandering around outfitting sites on the web, I can find 4-person tents, but no bigger. And while I know English weather ain't great, s

In re B-P: He wasn't, actually, offered the post of Chief of the Imperial General Staff. He was never in contention for such a post, and couldn't have been - without getting too into the politics of the British Army, his military career was on the wrong track entirely. Finally...There are a number of sources for this, but I'll quote Wikipedia: "In 1910 Lieutenant-General Baden-Powell decided to retire from the Army reputedly on the advice of King Edward VII, who suggested that he could better serve his country by promoting Scouting." Furthermore, re WWI, from the same article: "

I mean feet, I say yards. Doh.

Okay, my sense of distance is never good, but I was just chewing on things... And I just realized. While I *hear* about 300 feet between patrol campsites, I have trouble envisioning it in practice. So I'm going to ask - are there any diagrams, etc. on the web that would show a notional troop camping arrangement using that method, and go into things like tent positioning, etc within the patrol campsite? At the same time - just how big of a cleared area are we talking about? I'm trying, I guess, to imagine if there's anywhere I can think of nearby that could ever even fit cam

I take everybody's corrective point. Okay, maybe it's not as much of a chicken/egg dilemma. I would argue that there still might be one in a brand new troop without even first-class or second-class scouts, but that's in some ways a separate issue. Given that I'm usually the *optimist* on what kids of any age can do and handle, to find I'm underestimating them is embarrassing to say the least.

I won't deny I like getting applause, BadenP, but I'm confused what you're applauding specifically. One thing that strikes me as an outsider is two facts that usually arise simultaneously, I'd imagine. First, for the Patrol Method to work, you *need* older Scouts. You need active Star, Life, and Eagle Scouts. Second and related, the new troop doesn't have those. And the way things work in most organizations (to which I doubt Scouting is an exception), the habits established initially are very hard to break. Without older scouts, the adults basically have to take the lead. A

I promised myself I wouldn't get involved in the 3G debate I have no skin in the game on...But, oh, hell. It's Friday and I'm bored. OGE's thought of a poll of the membership is a good one. I'd make it of the *membership*, however, not the COs - for the sake of the COs. One of the biggest CO groups, the Catholic Church, has an impressive split in the US between 'conservative' and 'liberal' factions (relatively speaking!) just among the bishops, and you could wreak all sorts of unintended havoc if you polled parishes acting as COs. Similar with a lot of other CO groupings like the VFW - yo

In total agreement with twocub and Beavah. My gut says to ignore everything the stepdad or mom might say on this issue. Keep doing what you're doing, if they try to bring it up to EBOR take the gloves off and drag them through the mud. Kids who lie about abuse don't get that specific, my gut instinct says. Do warn the kid in SMC that Mom and Dad are saying this, though - just in case they try to wreck his EBOR at the EBOR, he'll be prepared. Yes, I am unambiguously on the Scout's side here. He has no way to defend himself except you guys.

If "In truly urban areas there isn't much good Scouting", by which I'm guessing you mean cities like NYC, LA, Chicago, etc. (defining an urban area is tough), then I think it raises a question: Who *is* Scouting meant for, then? All boys that could subscribe to the Oath and Law I first learned in 4th grade, I thought was the hope. But that, if you had to focus and choose, it was created for (and is meant for) boys in *precisely* those urban areas. Whether it be the East End of London in the 1910s, Watts in LA in the 1960s, or kids in DC today. Kids in the country don't necessarily need th