T2Eagle

I would call the quality adequate. Lots of processed food, but I'm not sure how to avoid that given the circumstances. The quantity was way out if whack.

The biggest complaint we had was the wastage, most meals we received more than we could eat of most of the contents and there was no alternative to throwing it away. As an organization I would say we were shockingly unthrifty in the absolute tons and tons of food we had to throw away in the last 10 days.

As an example, the final night we had 90 hot dogs plus buns, two very large bags of chilli, 2 gallons of macaroni salad, two big bags of carrot sticks, a big bottle of ranch dressing, multiple bottles of ketchup and mustard, and a packaged apple pie for dessert --- all for 40 people. We ate close to all the hot dogs, maybe half the chili, at best a quarter of the macaroni, a quarter of the carrots and an appropriate amount of dressing and condiments. Everything not eaten, which was a lot, got tossed, and that happened every single meal.

We had one cooler and a limited amount of ice so anything perishable couldn't be sent back and had only a very short life in the cooler before we had to throw it away. With non perishable foods the amounts were equally excessive, we had again only limited storage in the site, and instead of pitching everything we dumped it in big piles up at the sub camp HQ. In theory those foods could be donated to food pantries, but I'm skeptical that there was actually a logistical ability to make that happen. As a guess I would guess most of that ended up in a dumpster today.

It was really depressing dumping so much good food every single evening

Does anyone have a link to a good map of the Jamboree? I can get one on my phone but the scale makes it difficult. The so called maps on the jambo web site are useless.

I'm an ASM for our contingent, I got this forwarded from someone further up the food chain. We sent it out to everyone in the Jambo troop. Interestingly neither my son nor I received the original screwed up e-mail.

My guess about the actual Jambo is that there will be lots of hiccups but they'll feed us and the volunteers will make the programs work.

They have been asking anyone with a contingent, like myself, to volunteer in program areas, so I'm sure they're a little short of help.

BD, I received this e-mail earlier, it looks like it's just a screw up not a problem with your medical.

"An email went out last night to jamboree participants referencing their medical forms being incomplete. The email was incorrect and is causing a lot of participants and their families undue stress and worry. IDG is working to send out an email right now asking everyone to disregard the email that was sent. If anyone contacts you about this email, please extend our sincerest apologies for the confusion and ask them to disregard.

If someone should have any questions about their medical or the email, please ask them to call the National Support Center at 855-707-2644 and they will assist them.

Again, we do apologize for the mix-up and are working as quickly as possible to have it corrected.

Thank you.

Larry"

I understand why people are upset about this as an idea. I don't understand why people think that anything in their unit is going to need to change, or be decided, or occur at all.

I'm guessing that the majority of the people on this board have sons of scouting age. When was the last time anyone met the parent of a son your age who was gay? There are actually very very very few of them. When was the last time that anyone here even had a conversation in a social setting with someone you knew to be gay? What makes you believe that you will, in anything like the predictable near future, have someone who is openly gay actually apply to be a member of your unit?

Scouting is going to remain overwhelmingly white, middle class, and heterosexual for a long time to come. Everyone at summer camp this year will look just like you --- just like they did last year and the year before.

"So what national pressure is there on Catholic churches to accept Gay priests? or even members?"

It's a complex issue, but there are already openly gay priests and gay members of the Catholic faith.

Most Catholic high schools have experience with gay students and programs in place to ensure that they are treated with dignity and respect. What they absolutely do not do is summarily dismiss them or try to "cure" them.

In the still very unlikely event that you have a scout admit he is gay, and if you are in a Catholic sponsored unit (or even if you're not), the local Catholic high school would probably be a good place to start for some guidance on how to handle the situation.

Relax. I dont think you will need to do anything, or decide anything, probably ever. There is not a long line of gay adults who have been sitting around just waiting to queue up to volunteer to be scout leaders. Nor is there a long line of gay male high school students waiting to come out publicly to their peers and then become Boy Scouts.

Who are your scouts now? Where do your leaders come from now? Thats who you will have tomorrow and in the future.

If you are like most units your leaders are the parents of your scouts. A quick search turns up a figure that less than of one percent of kids in this country live in households headed by same-sex couples. Figure only half of them are boys and it makes the chances that your unit will ever have to worry about this as a real issue very very small.

In Troops, leaders often also include parents of scouts who have aged out and occasionally a scout who has stayed in troop past 18 and become a leader. So, very slim chance of the issue with that first group, how about the second? Something like 5% of males may be gay, drop that by percentage of boys who become scouts, and drop that again by the percentage who will want to be a leader in your troop and you are again at the point where you will have to decide almost any other issue scouting may have to offer before you get to this one.

And if at a Tiger recruiting night Joeys two moms volunteer to be den leaders, then and only then will you actually have to make a decision. Until then, dont worry, dont do anything, dont decide anything, you are much more likely to cause yourself trouble than avoid any by trying to decide some hypothetical situation that you will probably never actually encounter.

JoeBob,

You pose good questions and I'll have to give some thought before I can answer. Your troop sounds similar to mine and I struggle with the same questions.

But I think it's also important to ask yourself what their peers are doing while your boys are "caving, climbing (indoors), rafting, snow skiing, zip-lines, water skiing/tubing, shooting (rifle and shotgun), Camporee, bicycling, summer camp, canoeing, and one backpacking trip." The answer is probably playing video games and participating in entirely adult directed activities. Your scouts could probably get where you want them to go pretty quickly if they desire it. Their peers would have a hard time even understanding where you want them to go.

I agree with Beav that this challenges good representational democracy regardless of which party you support, and is an evil committed by both parties when ever they get a chance. Additionally, better technology and demographic changes semm to be exacerbating the problem.

So, without regard to this past election, would someone like to defend gerrymandering? Like Sentinel, I live in Ohio, and the ballot measure that we had was designed to specifically combat this practice, but it not only lost, it was trounced, 70 -- 30! And I don't understand that outcome at all. In case anyone just woke up after a fortunate three month nap, it's pretty well undertood that here in Ohio we are evenly divided in our political beliefs, and yet we seem to overwhelmingly agree that gerrymandering is good. The measure was a cumbersome thing on the ballot itself -- you had to scroll through 3 or 4 pages of text to go from the question to get to vote your answer, but I just don't understand why such a large majority of voters would affirmatively reject such a straight forward piece of good governance.

Is anyone one else on the board from Ohio? How did you vote? Why?

I don't think you need a rule or set of guidelines or having all the den leaders speak to everyone. You need to talk to the idiot parents and son who did this. He shouldn't have had it, he shouldn't have shot it at anyone, he's never allowed to bring it again, and that's all there is to it.

Probably everybody else in your Pack has enough sense to not let their son bring a wrist rocket to a scout event, let alone let them shoot it at anyone. So there's no reason to chastise everyone or come up with a set of rules or guidelines. Keep it simple, solve the problem you have --- this kid, this family, and that will probably be the end of it.

Before you throw in the towel you should know that football thing isn't really so great right now --- just ask anyone from Wisconsin.

I'll play along with this.

First, congrats to your son.

Second, we had our troop COH last night, only two scouts in the troop weren't in attendance, both called ahead of time with good reasons. SPL ran the COH, which was only the second or third time that's happened recently so we're still making progress on the boy led path. After the COH we had troop elections, at the last PLC the scouts decided to go to mixed age patrols. They formed one Venture patrol with about a half dozen senior guys and then two regular patrols of 11 each. Had one of my 16 year olds step up and get himself elected SPL, before he agreed to do it he made his Venture Patrol buddies promise they'd help him be successful. Patrol A (they don't have names yet)elected the scout I thought would get elected, Patrol B elected one of our first year scouts, mine is not to reason why nobody asked me to vote.

All in all a fun evening of the boys taking care of their program.

Where's the smear in this article? I don't see anything that's not factually reported. And what's your definition of "did NOTHING wrong?"

In 1979 in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania a 30 year old man grabbing the buttocks and crotch of a 14 year old boy was committing a felony punishable by a long prison term. The Scout Executive at the time must have at least sort of believed it or why else would he have forced the guy to resign. It's true the SE didn't himself break the law by not reporting it. But I have seen posters on this board argue we should call the cops on our own scouts for at worst misdemeanor behavior. But you would say a scouting professional who accepts at least the possibility that one of his employees committed a felonious sexual assault on a 14 year old is just fine not notifying the authorities about it.

That wouldn't have met my definition of "NOTHING wrong" then or now.

Yah, hmmm as some say.

I read this article, and if its a hatchet job the reporter needs to lose a couple corners off his Tote n Chip.

As a piece of journalism its not too bad for a small market paper. They took a national story and dug deep enough to come up with some more local angles, and then did some decent foot work on that. Unless you think its somehow just wrong to be writing about this at all, there doesnt seem to be anything untoward about the idea for the piece.

As near as I can tell theres nothing in the story that can be factually disputed, and I think theres less editorializing in the reporting than there is in Beavahs reporting of the reporting . Depending on your predisposition the article let's you conclude anything from the scouts did OK, to they could have done better, to, inferring everything bad, they maybe missed alerting the authorities to a guy about whom there still isnt any public information supporting the idea hes bad.

Heres MY editorializing. The SE comes out OK, they report he didnt inform state officials, but they also note the authorities were involved from the beginning, he gave diligent consideration to what his duty was, and the law at the time, since changed, supported that position. Their reporting his widows statement about how he agonized over allegations, and that he did report anything he was supposed to, makes him look like a good guy who didnt do anything wrong this time, and did the hard but right thing all other times.

The other case actually gives me some pause. In 1979 a 14 year old scout reported a DE to his SM, and his story was compelling enough that the SM reported it up the ladder, where the story remained compelling enough that a 30 year old man was forced to resign because he didnt think he could defend himself against the uncorroborated statement of a middle schooler. That was not the way these things usually turned out 30 plus years ago. And the lads family apparently believed him enough that they wanted the DEs hide.

Beavah is the one who usually urges us to give deference to the local unit leader and trust their judgment regarding their scouts. But in this case, even though the SM apparently found the scout credible, Beav reports it as a (possibly false) report. I think if one of my 14 year old scouts came to me with this kind of allegation Id be a pretty good judge of its credibility, and as a scout from that time I can assure you nobody was encouraging anybody to come forth with this kind of thing. It would have taken either a whole lot of malice or a whole lot of conviction to do so.

Later, this same adult, having lost his job because of one false accusation, decides hes willing to risk that again and reapplies. Now I love scouting, but one such experience would keep me cheering from the sidelines. Not this guy, one lost job, then a turn down showing the organization is still paying attention, and he tries a third time to get back into the organization, this time as a volunteer.As the song says "makes you want to go hmmm."

Heres why I think this is legitimate fodder for journalism. It is most likely that the guy is innocent, and the paper acts responsibly in not printing his name even though its now part of the public record. But there is a legitimate discussion that can be had that maybe this wasnt the only time where he, or someone else similarly situated, was allowed to resign quietly. Maybe it happened again at a YMCA camp a few states over a few years later, and maybe again at a soccer league. Then you dont have a case of an organization acting responsibly given the times, instead you have the template for successful predation. This is what good journalism does, it gets us to think, and talk, and want to know more.

My first thought when I saw this announcement was to go thank our Council exec board for keeping us out of the madness in the face of some pretty intense pressure from above to join in.

My second thought was how patronizing the announcement was. There's no real explanation or justification given for any of the changes; just a pat on the head and a cheery voiced "trust us" for what someone else described as the red-jacketed rabble.

I'm willing to believe that some consolidation of camps was inevitable given all the challenges faced, but where is the information. Which of these camps was at 40%? Which of these camps had infrastructure deficiencies that simply couldn't be met?

The lack of transparency in our organization confounds me, it reminds me of the worst aspects of when I worked for Fortune 500 behemoths. We in the rabble can actually handle full disclosure. We're used to making and understanding both difficult and complex decisions, and more importantly we are the cornerstone that makes the organization possible. We provide the volunteers, the money, and frankly even the youth being served. Scouts, scouters, and families have invested Time, Talent, and Treasure in these camps for years and even decades; they deserve a full explanation of why these decisions are being made.

If an organization can't provide complete and honest information, including the unpleasant parts, about the decisions being made, then it's probably the decision that's the problem not the people it's being explained to.

I have spent ALOT of time on tents the last couple years and learned more about them than anyone not in the business would want to know. Our troop has a barn full of equipment accumulated over the decades and we have one of everything, most of it with some sort of note like "broken zipper", "ripped fly", "missing pole", etc.

We have several of the Timberline 4s, and although a nice quality tent, I agree they're heavy and a pain for the younger guys to put up. There's a reason virtually everyone else has gone to some variation of the dome style.

We have a pile of the WAL-MART/Dick's/Meijers el cheapo tents. They're the ones with all the notes on them. Stay away from them no matter how good a deal you're offered. They are all manufactured by the same company, North Pole Ltd., and they simply do not keep the weather out. As I explained to my committee, they are designed for a family that wants to give camping a try: they go to the local state park and if they have a storm and their stuff all gets wet they pick up and go home. If we camp and our stuff all gets wet we stay and camp in wet gear -- in August that's just an inconvenience, but in October that's a safety issue.

I highly recommend the Alps Scoutdirect program which Oak Tree mentioned. Once you register with them they give you a consistent 40-45% off retail on everything, and they occasionally, including every Christmas, have sales with even more of a markdown.

I found their tents match up really well to scout use at their price point. Their market strategy is to consistently give you sturdier materials, bigger/better zippers, larger/stronger poles than their competitors at the same retail price point. When you then knock that down to their scout price you can't beat it.

I have a Lynx for my personal use, I have never had a drop of rain in it, and that includes a thunderstorm that took out a couple of our Timberlines. It has vestibules over each door, which I like, but the scouts don't because it means two zippers to get in and out, and they're too impatient. I got my son a Mystique for Christmas, it went to Philmont, got rave reviews, and came back unmarred; it's easy to put up, but it's not a free standing tent so maybe not what you're looking for. I bought two Meramacs this year for summer camp as a start to replacing the WalMart specials; they held up really well. They're a bit heavy for serious backpacking, but I think they will be great for month in, month out scout camping.

One other note, Campmor will give your troop a 10% discount on all their merchandise; you have to jump through a couple hoops, but as a close out retailer they often have some good pricing.(This message has been edited by t2eagle)

"There can be only one"

Do you mean Tiggers or immortal beings who go around chopping each other's heads off?

You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and

they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony,

they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them.

And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in

singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an

organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said

fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and

walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement.

I remember one side was clearly winning the argument and changing minds on the other side.

"Undertall" -- I like it, I knew all along it was my height not my wieght that was my problem.

Stosh,

Have you ever actually known anyone who was receiving welfare and told you they were proud of it? If you did, do you really think they were the norm and not an anecdotal outlier? Ive only known a couple of people who received welfare, in both cases it was because of a catastrophic event in their family, one was abandonment by the husband/father/breadwinner the other was a terrible illness to same. In both cases the adults involved hated it but did it to feed their kids. Ive known more people who collected unemployment, including some very recently, and all equally hated it and were assiduously searching for work.

Being poor in this country is extremely unpleasant and stressful, being out of work adds feelings of inadequacy, frustration, and degradation. No one in their right mind is happy or proud of it. And the facts show that the vast majority of people who take advantage of these stop gap measures that weve democratically decided to confer on ourselves do so for only a limited period of time.

In my state, a family that sends its child to a premier public university receives the equivalent government benefit of 30 weeks of unemployment. If youre fortunate enough to take advantage of the former societal benefit youre considered noble, if youre unfortunate enough to need to receive the latter benefit youre considered a parasite --- Ive never understood that.

I was astounded again.

Despite a troop swim in the lake, and despite a mandatory shower on Wednesday, parent night, and despite having to put on a uniform shirt every night for dinner and retreat, one of my co-leaders noticed on Thursday that one of my scouts had been wearing the same t-shirt all week. It was a troop t-shirt and so it wasn't one that would catch the eye.

The scout assured us he had been changing his socks and underwear daily -- just not his shirt. I didn't bother asking why because I figured no explanation would really make me any wiser.

E61,

Wasn't it the same problem with socks a couple years ago?

We have at least one troop swim during the week and we insist every scout take a shower on Wednesday on clean stuff at least -- family night. Hard to see how they would end up not putting on at least one clean pair, but scouts never cease to astound.

E61, or anyone else who could answer,

Are all those travel teams a part of LL? I'm not sure that around here even the non-travel rec. teams are officially LL.

When I was that age you played LL, and then after the regular season if you were an All-Star you became part of a team representing your town that, if you continued to win, could theoretically end up in the LL World Series in Mechanicsburg.

I don't think any team around here, travel or not, is part of that system.

JMHawkins,

I have never been able to successfully spin off a thread, so if anyone else can please do so, for now Ill continue the discussion here, it is a worthwhile discussion.

There are two parts Id give in answer to your concern. First your analogy isnt complete and needs to be expanded to fully see what the process looks like. And second, our judicial system, like all the other parts of our democracy, is, paraphrasing Churchill, the worst form of a judicial system, except all the others that have have been tried.

On your analogy, if you ever have the misfortune of having to read the full court filings, as opposed to a reporters or furry internet creatures paraphrase of them, youd find that they are actually very carefully written to distinguish between what the writer knows to be a fact and what the writer believes either can be discovered to be true or can reasonably be inferred to be true once all the facts are available. So a court filing of your story would fully read more like this: Scout Billy runs up to the SM and breathlessly says "Mr. SM, Johnny or George or Abe carved Johnnys initials into that old growth redwood over there. Im pretty sure when we got here there were no initials carved into that tree, but now there are, and I saw Johnny and Abe and George standing near the tree for a while, and the initials look a lot like Johnnys. So I think Johnny probably carved the initials but it might also have been George or Abe. Mr. SM you have to find out who carved the initials." Thats the initial complaint.

Now you have discovery. The SM looks at the tree and says yes they look like Johnnys intials, what do you boys have to say for your self? Johnny says couldnt be me, I forgot to bring my knife today. George says I have my knife, but look its all rusted and dull so it couldnt have been me. Now we have two alternative endings to the story 1) Abe shows SM his knife and its sharp, shiny, dripping with sap, or 2) Abe shows SM his knife and its sharp and shiny, but he says it wasnt me, in fact Mr. ASM, an avid birder, told me this could be the work of the rare Red Bellied Initial Carving Sap Sucker. SM calls ASM (expert witness) over and he says yup thats consistent with the work of the RBICSS alright.