qwazse

Official transcript: https://news.utexas.edu/2014/05/16/admiral-mcraven-commencement-speech

At p<.05 ... until you start launching projectiles that achieve orbital velocity.

Having never known any Sea Scouts to want to persue venturing awards, (only venturers who wanted to be part of a Ship ... and in the process earn Quartermaster), I'm not sure what the implications of this really are. Any participants who would like to collaborate across divisions will do so. The organizational chart won't make a difference. (In a sense this boils down to one (?) less meeting that someone has to send a representative to.)

Fred, not personally trying to bust your chops on this one. I'm pretty sure if this turned up in your unit you'd be pretty hot about it to the adults and kind and courteous to the boy as you try to sort it all out ... with that in mind, think about what you're implying: If the kid doesn't fulfill the requirements and knows it, he/she doesn't deserve the award. If the kid doesn't fulfill the requirements and doesn't know it, he/she deserves the award? So is ignorance an alternative requirement in any organization that you know of? Moz' was correct in running this up the chain to National.

That would be awesome! Except, even if banks would allow it, BSA policy wonks would shout "Hazing!"

Even if the scout was ignorant of the adult shenanigans, letting the rank stand would have been wrong. "Adult error" would be something like recording the wrong date, an unregistered MBC, lost paperwork, or maybe an SPL assigning a service project that the previous SM always approved but the current SM would never. Boys catch on real quick when a kid sneaks one by, and it will demoralize a troop faster than you can sing the "I'm a" of the little teapot song.

Yeah, sure, caveat emptor. But unlike YPT or other safety statistics, there's no reference in this site to embezellment rates so that scouters understand the implications of different financial management strategies. So, we have a talking (typing?) head trying to herd a 100K treasurers in a particular direction. I'm just not sure what the purpos is. Is there currently a certain level of reported significant loss (say more than $400) in so many units, and they want to reduce the number of vulnerable unites by x%? I know that every line of stats results in dozens of posts haggling over the calculation of the figures. But, it at least gives you some idea of what the author thinks to be the magnitude of the problem.

One of our most enthusiastic GS moms had gone to such a Jamboree as a youth. (Good thing, as she had 3 daughters!) By the description of it it sounds a little more like what Venturers in our region call an Area summit. I hope they enjoy their time ... even though they'll be deprived of the extended hiking opportunities!

Okay, as much fun as MultiQuote is let me spare repeating everyone else and only repeat myself: Never assign PoR's based on need for rank advancment. Assign them because the boy has or may have a knack for the position. Don't care if the boy is still working on Tenderfoot. If he's the best guy for the job, put him in the position. Use the handbook for expectations. That ILST course might not roll around in a timely fashion for the boy to really master his PoR before he is up for his next BoR. You and SPL might not have time for a personal orientation. He might not have the patience for another lecture. Say these words "Read everything your handbook has to say about your position, next week tell me what it says, then tell me what you will do about it." By next week there might be two or three "to do's" in the kid's head if you're lucky. Tell him "Pick one. Please do it by/on our next meeting." No boy needs a PoR for advancement to Star or Life. I had to set committee members straight regarding this at our last meeting. There is no shame in being assigned a service project that benefits the troop. Leading up to summer camp there are a multitude of tasks that adults appoint for themselves, wouldn't it be great to have a scout who will hunt down those med forms? Maybe you've had a good many historians who've made dozens of posters and you've run out of space to hang them. How about making a scrapbook or two covering the last ten years while the current historian catches up the last six months. Son #2 is manic about baking cakes. If he didn't double down on PoRs for fits and giggles, why couldn't he serve up a few for Courts of Honor? Do you have a boy like that? Maybe you have a boy who wants to do nothing but chuck a pumpkin 300 yards. Assign him a catapult assembly goal for the county fair. Who's overwhelmed? Who needs one task taken off their hands? Maybe only for a month? Maybe there's a charity your troop wanted to support, but nobody seemed to have the time to call and line it up. Maybe if you weren't assigning positions that nobody in your troop particularly cares about, someone would! Obviously, for service projects, you'd want the kid to think of a proposal if you don't have one, then flesh out a plan, then implement it. Not that he'll ever need to do anything like that ever again. No boy needs to advance beyond first class unless he (not momma or pappa) decides he needs to. He always needs to be responsible. He always needs to lead. You just have to help him figure out how. Not every boy needs a first class patch to be a first class scout. Don't ask me why, but with some guys, you just have to sneak it in. "How about getting your CPR cert? Just in case I collapse on you boys? And hey, maybe your girlfriend would like to get it with you?" "Can you set up the knot board for the crossovers?" "The borough council is talking about selling off your ball park, maybe you should sit in on that meeting." There is so much pressure on SMs to become bean counters. Please help them to become scouters.

What I fail to understand is what National has to gain in all of this. So, what if some malicious scouter transfers a troop treasury into his coffers in one fell swipe? Sure that's traumatizing for the troop, and it may make the evening news, but there are many more scouters who are paying fees quickly and directly through the treasury via these cards. NOTE: My units are not. They are still check based, but single-signature.

Just because I wanted to try out MultiQuote ... No so much preposterous as discrediting to Canus domesticus and Felix domesticus and their careful breeding program involving selection of monkeys, generation after generation, until they had a stock with insanely accurate throwing arms (all the better to defend against their wild-type cousins). As with most gross oversimplifications, accuracy is lost. However, there are mutually cannonical scriptures that can be used to support that and other practices. (E.g., St. Paul recognized Corinthians who baptized for the dead.) And, within the "middle books" there are scriptures that refute that and other practices. Or, perhaps "finely evolved" ... Maybe, as such a creator evolves to overlook our foibles, your decendants will have blurrier vision, at least when it comes to noses! My general impression is that we moderns have wrongly treated imago dei metaphore as "reflection of god", which makes absolutely no sense because there is no discussion of reflections anywhere in the Pentateuch. What there is discussion of? Idols. And generally, when idols are mentioned, the word image is mentioned as well. It seems that most everyone at the time saw mankind (or at least this tribe of people) as helpless victims of circumstance (famines and war will do that to one's cultural identity). The writing is NOT in favor of discovering the one-true-God in mankind ... and the subsequent chapters attempt to make clear the opposite. Genesis opposes Man trying to discover itself in its depictions of the creation. The Genesis writer(s) are saying that "Whatever pathetic picture we make of Mankind, at least it beats the snot out of your neighbor's idol. So stop being slaves to whatever else other people are worshipping these days." The scariest part about the modern take on the Sacred Myth of Origin, is that it insists that that a supernatural event can be rationally explained. That it will be found scientifically that the current world snapped into being in seven rotations of our planet. In light of such a discovery, God would have to be believed. But, the human mind is a massive inference engine, and it will just as readily be able to explain how the flora and fauna could arise in a few short dates in the absence of a Creator.

Well NJ, your boys could sit on BoRs of their venturing crews.

For fits and giggles I upped one of Moz's and downed one of Stosh's in this thread. One of each a day is good enough for me. But it would be nice to know the upper limit. Do you get one of each kind? Or, a grand total of, say, three of either. Or is it a function of your so-called "reputation"?

Does it answer "Take off your shoes, for you stand on holy ground."

I take the description to be more of a suggestion than a requirement. Most times, the Chaplain's Aide would need a "go to" adult. I had a religiously diverse family -- and no small amount of arrogance -- so I had no problem with the position on my own as a youth. I've seen other youth manage well without adult support. But, by and large, most boys will need guidance picking a reading and setting up a time for vespers, promoting religious awards, etc ... It's definitely one that if you don't have the right boy or a willing adult capable of helping a less-than-prepared boy, you're better off going without the position.

The decisions on cannon are a study in itself. But protestants and catholics work from the same OT and NT. They dispute the importance of apocrypha ... which basically cover the period between Israel's return from exile, the wars of Maccabees, and the rise of Roman occupation -- most devout protestants (and, obviously, Jews) read it sooner or later. There is nothing from those books that couldn't be inferred from agreed-upon cannon, and therefore the extra narrative does not explain any schism. The one distinction between Jewish and Christian cannon, is the ordering of the books. The Jewish Bible has books in Chronological order, while the Christian Old Testament is ordered (crudely) by style of writing (Law, History, Poetry, Major (i.e. prolific) Prophecy, and Minor (i.e. brief) Prophecy). Obviously, the NT sets the tone for divergence in Jewish and Christian thought. But, even there, the writing seems to reflect on why there is a division, not drive people to be divisive. If you have a bookish scout who wants to discuss these things (at least from a Christian perspective), here is a source of public-domain material that a friend started back when everyone was asking what the "www" on his buisness card meant: http://www.ccel.org/search/books/apocrypha. The Vatican library produces similar resources online. (I'm sure there are comparable Jewish sites. And, at last look, the Islamic schools are getting there.) (And yes, CCEL comes with an app.)

What, you don't? Sorry you're missing out. I once explained orthodoxy (to a zealous protestant friend who was a little in denial about being protestant) as the doctrine that we choose to hand down to our children because we have found it to be of lasting value. The trick is making sure that "we" includes the carnival of souls who've come before and gone ahead.

The "seat of the pants" thing isn't all that bad. But, people need an anchor. Let that anchor be the handbook. It is easy to get cheezed at boys not following your spoken order. (And yes, in my familiy if you asked Dad a question that Mom had already answered in a way you didn't like, it was grounds for severe negative reinforcement.) But take it down a peg and make sure you get to the heart of the issue. Ask them why they went to the ASM instead of the SM. If it was because they knew that the SM would be critical of their performance, then ask them why they thought that. If it was because they hadn't perfomed their duties as layed out in their handbook, ask them what they should do with that signature. If they come clean, get with the SPL and see what kind of project would make up for the last six months slacking. But, it could be that, early on, they started to do stuff in their position and something someone said led them to shut down. Maybe the SM came off like he wasn't available to talk over their attempts. This does happen with "seat of your pants" organizations. Recognition goes by the wayside and boys fall through the cracks. In this scenario, ask the boys what they learned from this, and if they'd like an opportunity to do something differently. I wouldn't make this about Scout Spirit. I'd make it about fullfillnig the requirement.

Zero sleeping quarters. 8x8 tarps for each person. On the ground around your respective fires. Fold the tarp over your sorry hide if the weather turns foul. Stow bedrolls under one fly in the morning. Combine the remaining tarps for fly's during the day. One single-person camp shower per patrol, set up in a different location each day, with two fly's for privacy. Unisex latrine with "occupied" sign on the door.

Step 1: Abandon sub-par teaching methods, such as EDGE. Step 2: Adopt a method that actually brought the West out of the darkages. The first step of which should include "Reference." Step 3: Refer to the handbook, or to a mobile app (in this case meritbadge.org): The historian preserves troop photographs, news stories, trophies, flags, scrapbooks, awards, and other memorabilia. The chaplain aide works with the troop chaplain to meet the religious needs of Scouts in the troop. He also works to promote the religious emblems program. Step 4: Do what's written, on a monthly basis, check in with your PL or SPL for after action review, improve. Or, Step 4b: Ignore what's written for six months, return to step 1. Whose fault is it? Who cares? Since when is a star scout's advancement supposed to be dependent on anybody but his own. Either he did what was layed out for him in the handbook and six well-chosen merit badge pamphlets or he did not. If he did not, he is not, by definition, a life scout. In fact, if a boy comes to me and says, "Sir, I have been waiting to be assigned a position for 6 months, meanwhile the QM was a jaggoff, so I inventoried the gear and got everyone to clean it all after the fall camporee, I went to my younger brother's den meetings because their chief was all about the basketball this winter, and I a got Jamila (this girl in another crew) to check out In the Name of God. You're welcome." Guess who's getting his book signed on the spot, in bold, with no apologies to how much of a headache it will give the andvancement chair with the Troopmaster? Let me ask again, how is this complicated?

After I read your post yesterday, there was a "server driver error" ... The first one with this new software ... Just sayin'

In what world does something signed under false pretenses constitute fulfillment of requirements? None in which I want our youth to grow.

How is this complicated? If the boys did not fulfill the requirements, scratch the signature. The whole thing could be easily remedied if the Historian produces his summary of troop events over the last six months (a poster of photos and captions maybe) and the Chaplain's aid produces his "order of service" (e.g., the scriptures he chose to read for each campout) or list the homesick boys he helped at camp. Really NYC, you should have written in their books "POR unmet as of April 2015." Betcha they would have gone straight to the SM then!

Actually, a 1st year scout in my Sunday school class (troop on opposite side of town) noted that his older brother was going to "have to take" Cit. Nation at MbU, These boys are rather bookish -- good fits for digital technology, but even they caught on the the ridiculousness of it all. Oh, and E94-A1, only 3/4 of "scouting" is "outing." The other 1/4 is "sc".

Sorry, spent the weekend talking to folks who remembered when youth Explorers could join O/A, then it went co-ed, then the brotherhood became a "Boy Scouts only" kind of thing. What I am saying is that these inclusive programs will generate first class scouts (i.e., kids with skills, frequent campers, admired by their peers) who will see themselves as excluded and those "joining requirements" as little more than "whites only" bathroom signs in their furtive little minds. A little issue, to be sure. Unless arrowmen and eagles are picked for jobs for which these high ranking (in their respective domain) scouts are passed over. Then the nominal rank can no longer be a hallmark of excellence, and it loses value.