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The vendors/sponsors must be flocking. They aren’t making that figure with registration fees.

Getting antibiotics as soon as you find out you’ve been bit is key. My citified docs wanted me to take a dose every time I came out of the woods! I guess if a doc ever forces the issue, I’d opt for a jab over perpetual doses of antibiotics. My buddy’s son-in-law was crippled from Gillian-Barr syndrome precipitated by a flu shot. So, I try to keep him in mind when I review vaccine outcomes. The most recent have been incredibly safe. That’s why trials like these are able to go forward. We just have to be careful about training folks to be on the lookout for side effects. I’m not sure if my logic is entirely correct, but I always tell folks who’ve reacted to a jab before to be very choosy about vaccines going forward.

As nasty as I’ve seen Lyme disease get, I remain skeptical of vaccines that are deployed against pathogens that rarely kill. Jabs rarely cause side effects, but when given to millions, we begin to observe sacrificing the well being of the few who react violently negatively to the vaccine for the sake of a few more who fall ill from the disease.

There are some advantages to starting scouting later. One is that you can be bothered when a patrol is missing something. You might think that you can’t fulfill the requirement because your patrol flag is nowhere to be found, whereas an 11 year old would just say, “My patrol doesn’t have a flag, so I’ll do my best without it.” I think if you brought this up to the patrol and told him how important the flag is and how you all should remake one (at least temporarily until the preferred one is found), you’ve met spirit of the requirement.

Honestly, most of you all who post here regularly would make great CSE’s — for the scout-facing end of things, at least. But, the boardroom negotiations really needs to find the right balance. There is clearly a lot of pressure to respond to every public crisis in the country with a “we’ll use scouting to fix that” message. We need someone with the brutal honesty to say something like “with the rollout of Citizenship in the Society MB, less than 5% of our youth members will be exposed to DEI principles”.

I saw that once in northern Indiana. Some places have unwritten rules that are more solid than legislation,

External frames + bushwhacking: bring extra cotter pins, wire, thread, and tools. Brace for snags and torque. It’ll last decades. Internal frames + bushwhacking: bring extra thread, needles and chord. Fewer snags, but one must patch rips promptly. Jury is still out if it will last. BSA is trying to work an “internal frame” to minimize litigation snags (not just from CSA, but from accidents— both physical and psychological). I think this is because the organization has used up its cotter pins, wire, and repair kits (i.e. insurance and endowments.)

We have enough backpacks and tents in circulation from alumni scouts, that we now encourage first-years to borrow from our “gear library” until they figure out exactly what they want. I think that is a metaphor for what remains BSA’s strength. Here are a series of parts, practices, and techniques that can be passed from generation to generation.

@AwakeEnergyScouter, I’m a statistician by trade — primarily in psychology and cardiology. My employers and clients pay me for my independent evaluation. That does not mean they have me in their back pockets. The opposite holds. I retain (and have exercised) the right to withdraw my name from any document that misrepresents facts. But by-and-large, authors — even industry clients — defer to me on matters of presentation and interpretation. Reputation is the only capital worth acquiring. The same applies to time volunteered reviewing manuscripts for journals. The questions you and @yknot raise regarding a lack of financial disclosure, restricted data access, and/or statements that don’t apply in a larger context could speak to bias in Warren and Reed’s peer-reviewed article. If how I’ve seen friends compensated is any indication, Warren probably was well paid as an expert witness, but she also did so under risk of perjury. Given the lack of financial acknowledgment, it’s more likely that BSA did not pay her to continue the long road to publishing in an academic journal. Furthermore, .Mackinem and Laufersweiler-Dwyer explicitly state that they had no conflicts of interest to disclose. This would generally be understood that BSA gave access without restriction. Regarding data sharing in general, investigators tend to be quite cagey. They will often not share (or in this case, release license to) data until their initial results are published. That seems to have happened here. Although technically possible for BSA to self-publish more quickly, the legal liability in doing so would be great. And, I would trust them less. (Unless, of course, they hired me for the analysis. ) That’s not to say that the academic work presented so far is perfect. But, it’s not nothing.

Saw the driver ahead of you rush an intersection and get t-boned, and I never set convoy again. We arrange rendezvous points. The scout riding shotgun navigates for me. (I have paper maps for the very purpose.) He also checks my texts while my car is rolling.

It is common knowledge that BSA made its ineligible volunteer files available to an independent researcher at the University of Virginia. She provided initial findings in 2011, and an executive summary in 2012. Here's the reference to her formal work on the files, published years later on a sample of 6878 perpetrators of CSA: Warren, J. I., & Reed, J. (2021). Victim selection patterns of community‐residing child molesters identified by a nationwide youth‐serving organization. Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 39(3), 307-327. Those conclusions have been folded into the YPT program that we ask all parents to take. This year, one other publication reported on a randomly drawn sample of 48 cases ... Mackinem, M. B., & Laufersweiler-Dwyer, D. (2024). A Deeper Look at the Boy Scouts of America “Perversion” Files: Structural Factors Related to Access and Abuse. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 08862605241230091. It goes over many of the structural problems unique to the organization and tries to make optimistic conclusions. We need to remind ourselves that criminology is hard. The data that are gleaned from these reports are also studied by folks who think it is their God-given right to lure our nation's children for their basest desires. May none of us make the error that any given activity is such a safe haven that our guard should be lowered to any degree.

That’s some serious wishful thinking! Those “two hours in public view” are just the tip of the iceberg! From there, while noble coaches are trying to guide kids into a lifetime enjoyment of athletic pass time, the neighborhood predator, on the field or in the stands, is getting acquainted with hundreds of kids and ranking them by vulnerability. Sports and band camps are notorious for providing first exposures to pornography and worse. Some of the kids who are routinely assaulted at home:work their way up in the structure to where they can propagate assault. USA Gymnastics learned the hard way that large numbers of their athletes were extremely vulnerable because of inordinate trust in professional positions. The types of assaults that I became aware of as my kids advanced through varsity sports made me (and their coaches) nauseous. Moreover, because there is no national oversight of leadership in youth sports, we have no idea of the risks to participants. With what I’ve learned now, would I still allow my kids to participate fully in athletics? Yes. Do I believe that structures like Sandusky laws have helped mitigate risk to some degree? Yes. Do I believe we’ve had a net effect of protecting our nation’s youth from CSA? Jury’s still out, my hope is that one day overall risks to youth will be as low as BSA’s rate, but we have quite a way to go.

For being a joke, I have a couple of great nephews who TL/USA helped guide into adulthood. The BSA troop’s available to them were inadequate.

Personally, it wasn’t about any anti-male culture. I just remembered benefiting from multiple adult men in my life, and in scouting. I wanted my sons and daughter to have similar exposures in a weekend/week setting.

You are not thinking like many young teens who now have jobs, the earnings from which are expected to pay for activities. If their patrols can’t go shooting at their trained ASM/RSO’s club every month, they can spend their dimes joining the club as junior members from what they save on Scouting America registration fees. You might say only a small number of COs and families will let their scouts be so reactionary … just like families who react to the removal of dodge ball, or the removal of unisex program, … It becomes a decline by a thousand cuts. If a troop wants to maintain routine range time it could result in merely exchanging hazards For us the nearest commercial range is at least a half hour drive away (and I think this applies to most scouts) … twice as far as the nearest game lands or gun club, we double the risk of traffic accidents.

BSA can follow a pretty wide lane and be “in line” as far as WOSM is concerned. The largest or fastest-growing WOSM programs have been sex-segregated. In many of these countries the Guides and Scouts collaborate nicely. So, to really fall in line, BSA and GS/USA would “play nice” together, and that ain’t happening. I think we in the U.S. are faced with an influx of citizens like no other country, and many parents from Europe and South America may envision scouting as co-ed because that’s all they’ve known since childhood. On the other hand parents from India, Indonesia, and Gulf states only know segregated models. For some, but not all, national scout organizations, that’s shifting. (It was nice to see young women singing and dancing while visiting with the Saudi tent in August.) I think single moms are a serious consideration, but many single moms that I’ve met are looking for unisex programs for their boys where they believe male role models to be instrumental in a young man’s development. So those moms will value sex-segregated programs over co-ed. So, any mom rhetoric is just corporate double-speak. The ground truth, I believe, is that the organization has collapsed to the point that it is unreasonable for it to produce an all-boy and all-girl unit in every small community; therefore, it is positioning itself to allow each unit to be more flexible in its configuration in hope that doing so may make up for six decades of losses three decades from now.

I gave up referencing myself a while ago, so I won’t link to the thread that shows this data, but here goes anyway … while BSA was mulling over including girls in packs and troops (under the corporate double-speak “family scouting”), there was a WOSM census that revealed that membership declined in nearly every European country immediately after their scouting organization incorporated girls. Recovery to where they would have the same number of boys as they did before desegregation would take decades, if it has occurred yet at all. The UK took 25 years. So, if BSA is indeed about serving more youth, the strategy chosen is a very long term one — quite an anomaly for any American organization.

🙄 = on paper only

To acquire Venturers in any significant number, the registration fee will have to be less than the cost of a pizza and a movie. While we’re rumoring, scuttle but says there are co-Ed troops being piloted. But even on an informal basis this is happening. I was manning a station at spring Camporee and saw several patrols of mixed sexes. One or two may have bee ad hoc, but a couple operated well enough that I figured they weren’t segregated OPO.

I was thinking that, but Scouting America is no less of a trademark threat.

My take is that it needs a tagline: (Except for Canada, Mexico, Central and South America) No clue why we can’t be Scouts USA.

Ben Shapiro’s take …

Did you winter backpack? We always used our “circus tent” (actually a donation from the national guard) for winter campouts. It was the best way to keep an eye on younger scouts for hypothermia and frostbite. General health and safety might have also been your leaders’ concern.

It wasn’t a mandate. It’s been a matter of course for decades. And, it would even be in place if international youth events were all-male. Public health officials’ deployed this strategy to forestall death. Prior to the 90s, the occasional newborn was always possible but didn’t mandate preventative measures.

@captkeating, welcome to the forums.