cocomax

What is really weird is a movement like Atheism, which seems like a very simple thing can be taken over by fanatic zealots and be almost destroyed.

The Atheism / Skeptic movement is but a ghost of its former self from a few years back and is now more about feels then facts.

The Linux operating system has been  taken over by anti-cis-white-males activists. . . 

Activists from the feminist and LGBTQIA+ communities have been trying to force the Linux project to join the Contributor Covenant since at least 2015. The Contributor Covenant is an agreement to implement a special Code of Conduct (frequently CoC from now on) aimed at changing the predominantly white, straight, and male face of programming. CC’s Code of Conduct is controversial particularly because it allows anyone to be banned from contributing code for any reason, usually with no mechanism for oversight or accountability.

On September 16 the pro-CoC side got their wish–Linux had officially committed to implementing and obeying the CC Code of Conduct–and they immediately set about using it to remove top Linux coders.

Here are the CoC goals.

1. Fostering an inclusive and safe space for women, LGBTQIA+, and People of Color, who in the absence of the CoC are excluded, harassed, and sometimes even raped by cis white males.
2. Lack of CC’s CoC sustains meritocracy, which “has consistently shown itself to mainly benefit those with privilege, to the exclusion of underrepresented people in technology“.
3. The vast majority of Linux contributors are cis white males. CC’s Code of Conduct would enable the building of a more diverse overall demographic as people who aren’t cis white males feel welcome to join and white male harassers are weeded out.
4. Being against the CoC means you want women, LGBTQIA+, and People of Color to be harassed.

I wonder what will happen when feminists and LGBTQIA+ take firm control of BSA.

Just how weird are things going to get?

28 minutes ago, ParkMan said:

 

There must be some really awful Wood Badge folks out there.  In my council, they've all be very friendly and accommodating.  They're at times prone to songs, critter talk, and trying to recruit for the next course - but that's about as far as I've seen it go.  I've never once heard someone with their beads look down on someone who did not.  I guess we're just lucky on our council.  It saddens me to no end that there are awful Wood Badgers out there.

Sorry 

    What we got out here is a case of some really awful people that are using Wood Badge as a super secret elite club to bond with others of the same mind.  They are adding stuff that is not suppose to be part of Wood Badge and they are not even teaching the Wood Badge program as written. Awful people attract more awful people and you end up with a mess like there is in at my council. 

    Around here round tables are just things that the "in" people go to to talk about the people they hate. 

    The problem here is really the people and not the program, we have awful people messing up a great idea.

19 hours ago, Chris1 said:

I need to disagree on one main point. Training is important to let people know the RIGHT way to do things, and the rules and policies we must follow. How many time have you seen Scouters breaking advancement policy on Boards of review or SM Conferences, or adding requirements etc, because they thought it was ok, because they NEVER GOT TRAINED?  How many "experienced" scouters support singing for lost items because they remember it when they were scouts? I know many experienced scouters with lots of credentials who still defy policy and don't get things right.  

In my area the Wood Badgers make other Wood Badgers sing for their lost stuff and the Wood Badgers that run NYLT teach the NYLT leaders to make the scouts sing for their stuff. 

I have expressed my objects to such hazing many times, only to fall on deaf ears.

The worst case of this was at the last camp-o-ree I went to. A high level Lady Wood Badger,  tried to make an Arrow of Light cub scout to dance and sing to get back his lost medical inhaler, at evening flags, before I LOUDLY PUT A STOP TO IT and took the young scout aside to explain what they tried to do was very un-scout like, scouts are not suppose to haze. . .  This hazing garbage is the number one problem I have with Wood Badgers and Beading Campfires, it sets such a bad example. 

If I was not already BLACK LISTED by the wood badge elites before that I know that I am now, for putting a stop to their "fun".

We had a vote at a committee meeting to stay all boy out of respect to the Girl scout troop in our area that we were good friends with.

If a female leader wishes to rise up start a girl pack or mixed pack I am sure our CO would be fine with it.

The rep will be at the roundup tonight. 

The nearest co-ed girl pack is 50 miles away.

So. . .  our pack and troop are having a round up tonight.  Our district rep demanded to oversee and approve our ad, flyers and news stories write ups.  She also went out to all the schools in the area to promote the round up. 

We have a small troop of boys and a small pack of boys. 

Last night the rep contacts us and says, "I recruited a whole bunch of girls for you! They will be coming to your round up tomorrow night. Be ready to sign them up!"

So, in our area the district is trying to force girls into boy only packs,  I never read anywhere that was part of the plan.  The lady scouters that lead our pack are very upset, and might throw in the towel just fold the pack. 

Did you know 47% of women that recently graduated college have a job that does not require a degree, with an average salary of $37,330, and an average student debt of $39,400. 

. . . and 37% of men are in the same boat.

I’m sure people who take polo lessons or sailing lessons earn a lot more on average too, Does that mean you should send your kids to sailing school?

Young people feel they must go to college because if they don't they are in trouble, they are told they doomed to a life of being poor if they do not go to college. Costs are outrageously high, but you pay them because you have to, and because the system makes it easy to borrow massive amounts of money. 

The nightmare begins when you can't get out of the debt. Since government lenders have pretty much unlimited power to collect on student debt they can grab everything from salary to income-tax returns. Running away is not an option.  Most young people find themselves unable to make their full payments when they just get out of school end up perpetually paying down interest only, never even touching the principal.

Is a high school diploma worthless trash now? Is a BA / BS the new minimum standard to get a job now?

Why does a student that goes to college for 3.5 years and never graduate earn about the same as a high school grad on average?

Why does a Harvard grad make 200% more income than grads of average collages? 

College is nothing more that High School 2.0, but with under age binge drinking. 

Peter Thiel thinks college is a scam.

Elon Musk, knows college is generally bad, he knows, he has a degree.

I went to college for 3 years and learned how bad it was first hand.

Here is what Elon thinks. . . 

People will tell you college is an experience that inspires you to strive for more, to be your best. But in reality, it creates a workforce of mindless drones, set to take orders from the corporate hierarchy. It does not create the Steve Jobs of the world.

College is not for people that have problems with authority, who believe their way is the best way. But also readily look for mentors and others to help them grow as a person. For those who seek out problems to solve and have an unquenchable thirst to continually learn about the world around them. And most importantly, for those who know they were put on this planet to serve the greater good. That their purpose is to help others more than they help themselves.

A whole lot of women are in big trouble, 1 out to 5 are taking psychotropic medication for metal disorders (twice the rate that young men do)  Many women are graduating from colleges with worthless degrees with no hope of finding a job and an insane amount of college loan debt that they must pay back.

Too many times a college degree is a curse and not a blessing.

I know a woman who was a theatre major, when she could not find a job, so she went back to school. She ended up with a Ph.D. in Theatre and over $600,000 in student loan debt, she is currently teaching high school theater in the San Francisco area part time and making under $30,000 a year and does not have a place of her own to live at, she is so depressed, she hates her life. She feels like she has destroyed her life with debt she can never repay. 

Young people need to be told just how life wrecking ending up with a degree that will not get you a job and an mountain of school debt is. They need to be very sure that if they go to college the degree is worth the money they will spend on it.  There are too many people misleading young people with lies like:  

                             GIRLS CAN DO ANYTHING! FOLLOW YOUR HEART AND THE MONEY WILL FOLLOW!!!! 

     Everyone has limits and should learn what they are, I learned many of my limits in scouting.  I learned the important lesson that if I mess up, I can fail and bad things happen.  Some kids are so protected from any failure by lawn mower parents that they are delusional that they can do anything and it will work out fine, they feel like they can never fail and there is nothing to worry about.

     Girls and boys should think very carefully and make good decisions that will not destroy their life before they really get started.

They need to pick a life path that is right for themselves, that they can develop the skills to be successful at and make a living doing.  They should resist the pressure to become something that they do not have the skills or desire to do.  

Many young people are being smart by avoiding the pitfall that college can be. 

College is fast becoming an outdated thing anyway.  I can freely study any subject I wish pretty much free of charge on the internet and reach leaves of knowledge far beyond what colleges offer.   Once a person learns how to learn on their own, college is pretty meaningless, in fact it is a waste of time and money.

Many young people are starting their own successful businesses and avoiding college all together and doing very well. 

   One thing every young person need to learn is:  BE PREPARED!

   . . . .  if you mess up on the college thing, you might not be prepared for what comes next. . . .

   if you do the college thing right you might end up with a useful degree that will prepare you for what comes next. . . 

We would be a lot better off is we based hiring people and college admissions on merit and merit alone. 

More and more men do not want to go to college, they see it as a waste of time and not worth the cost.

Women keep going because it is drilled into them they MUST GO TO COLLEGE!!!

More and more businesses see most degrees as mostly worthless and now looking for people with ability and not a piece of paper that says they are smart.

I found out in 1987 that college was a waste of time, when my UCSC Computer Engineering program was de-accredited at the beginning of my 3rd year and the most complex thing they ever "taught" me was Ohm's law, something I mastered in 3rd grade. 

And things have gotten much worse, collages are dropping programming languages like JAVA, Python, C++, C# and instead embracing the Scratch programming language. . . which is a fine language for 4th through 8th graders,  but is beyond silly as a college level language.

There are College Electrical Engineering students using snap circuit kits and Lego mind storms in their classes.

I have meet electrical engineering graduates that did not know what a "white sheet" was or how to read it and they did not even understand simple things like voltage regulation. 

A PHD College professor and dear friend,  who taught advanced medicine a few years back, told me she was frightened by the lack of reasoning skills her students displayed. Almost none of them had the skills needed to think like a doctor. All they could really do is input data into a computer and do what the computer told them to do without questioning or thinking or knowing why.

I spent a whole day teaching a grade school science teacher with a masters in education what all those weird science toys in her 6th grade science class room did and what the basic science behind them was and how to use them to teach lessons to kids. . .  it is a weird world where a old boy scout / lumber jack spends the day showing a science teacher with a masters degree how to "science" and how to make it fun.  (That was my good turn for the day, I did it free of charge.)

Colleges are happy to dumb classes down to welcome in more students to rake in more money.   

Yes, there is a war on boys and men and it is horrible. 

The same people that are waging war on boys are also waging war on girls and women.

Boys are being treated like toxic monsters that need to be drugged into submission and girls are brain washed into thinking they are helpless victims that can't do anything on their own and require special help to get anywhere in life and men are the eternal enemy and oppressors of women.

Back when I was a kid, boys and girls liked one another and got along pretty well. My Boy Scout troop sold Christmas Trees along side the Girl Scouts and things were pretty dang swell. When I was a young man in college young men and young women got along great.

Maybe if the BSA troop level scouters pull a fast one on BSA national and follow the model of Girl Troops and Boy Troops instead of just going co-ed, we might end up with something very special, girls and boys getting along again. Boys becoming fine men and girls becoming fine women. 

I wonder what kind of kids an Eagle Scout Man and an Eagle Scout Woman would raise?

BSA is still a spark of hope in a world that has lost its mind. 

As a member of GSUSA and BSA, I think girls will do fine in a BSA program, it is a fine program for boys and girls. 

What I do see going haywire are the adults,  I see adults destroying programs in GSUSA and BSA because of selfish reasons, power trips, and sheer stupidity.

What I see going wrong is not the fault of the program or the youth.  The biggest problem is adults coming in with their own ideas on how to run things that go against the methods and aims of scouting and create a boring adult run program that drives the kids away in droves. 

A Girl Scout troop is only as good as its leaders make it.

There is one book that every new Girl Scout leader should read, it covers things that GSUSA training does a poor job covering:

Starting a Troop: A Guide for New Girl Scout Leaders
by Rae Brewer 

If you know any new Girl Scout troop leader, get them this book. There are things in there they need to know to have a successful troop. It was a real help to our troop.

What do you do when you have a group of boys that have no interest in a patrol method and just want to hang out with their buddies and have fun and just want to leave all the leadership stuff and planning to the adults. . .    even though the adults are coaching and training the boys to lead the program?

Sometimes when boys are allowed to "do whatever they want" (within the limits of safety, finances, and remaining in the game of scouting) they can sometime choose the easy,  but boring path, and then complain about how they never get to do anything fun. Maybe they choose the easy boring path because they are overwhelmed by school and sports and to them Scouts is a place to hang out with their friends and talk, and expect the adults do most of the planning.

It depends on who the boys pick as the SPL,  there are SPLs that don't want a boy lead troop and then there are ones that would not have it any other way. 

4 minutes ago, T2Eagle said:

A bit off topic, but this was on its way to being one of my favorite sessions at Woodbadge, but it instead became a symbol of what I came to really dislike about Wb.  Just as we were in the midst of a great discussion it was cut short because we had run behind on time and needed to move on to the next activity.  What was so urgent that we had to cut the discussion short --- a make-believe PLC where the main topic of discussion was what percentage of uniform inspection we should adopt that day to constitute a passing score.

The BSA best training I ever had as just sitting around with old timer scout masters and newly minted scout masters at summer camp talking for hours about the game of scouting, and life in general.  We talked about the fun times and bad times, what worked and what didn't.   Oh, the stories!

4 minutes ago, Chris1 said:

Commonly confused. It says "adult led and youth run" . Many people use "youth led" and "Youth run" interchangeably, but there is a specific meaning in this context. It means that the adults give needed leadership, mentor the youth, and take responsibility for ensuring things are safe, meet objectives and follow laws and policies. While the youth execute the program. 

I'm sure we could have a whole OTHER thread where people strongly disagree on the topic of what "youth led/run" means and how much involvement adults should have. 

 We run a scout led, adult mentored troop. 

"We can and must work together as one team, old and young, across generations."

"Young people respect and are willing to learn from well-intentioned people of
their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. By using the skills that we are learning
here at Wood Badge, we will be able to work together to find solutions. The
Millennials are open to partnership—be sure that YOU are. They have much to
share and to say, so listen to them. Find your shared vision and make it a reality.
Scouting tomorrow will be as different from today as we are now from 30 years
ago. Together we can create the greatest change in Scouting history and equip
our next generation of leaders to build upon our legacy."

Wood Badge
Day Four: Generations in Scouting
(Troop Presentation)
Time Allowed
60 minutes
Learning Objectives
As a result of this activity, participants will be able to
■ Understand generational differences as another aspect of diversity.
■ Consider how these differences impact each group.
■ Understand the “adult led, youth run” aspects of a unit.
■ Learn ways to work together across generations for a better future.
Materials Needed
■ Adhesive notes labeled with generationally diverse character names
■ Small group activity worksheets/situations
■ Handout with characteristics of each generation
■ Flip chart pad and markers

What is weird is when I was a scout in the 1970's  I never once remember hearing the words, "Wood Badge". I was a scout for 6 years and had no clue what wood badge was.

My scout master had a funny looking neckerchief slide made of leather and some beads, but he never once talked about what that was. 

I knew all about the Order of the Arrow, we all thought that was a really cool group. 

Now days scouts and scouters hear about wood badge all the time.  At distinct events and summer camp wood badgers will stop scouters at random and spread the good news of wood badge, and the scouts have to listen again and again to the same old story of how life changing wood badge is. . . (the truth is they need warm bodies at the next wood badge class and this wood badger has a ticket that a goal to recruit X number of scouters to go to wood badge)

I can't remember a camp-o-ree that I went to over the last 7 years that did not have their camp fire taken over by wood badgers.  It really spoils the camp fire for the scouts, it is boring to everyone to listen to the same old speech about how great wood badge is and how to sign up today, followed by a bunch of mean spirited inside jokes (possibly off colored, I don't know) and name calling and hazing between the wood badgers, I can never make heads or tails of it. The wood badge program always seems to run about 45 minutes. 

The worst is when they subject CUB SCOUTS to this non-sense. The poor cubs were expecting a fun camp fire program and they end up with a SURPRISE wood badge beading campfire program,  instead. 

Camp-o-ree event that I have seen in person, a few months ago.

Rocket Launching Contest: (Lawn Mower Scouter Style)

Goal, scouts launch a solid fuel model rocket and try to land it closest to a marked target area. The patrol that lands their rocket closest to the target wins the contest.

No farther instructions are given to the scouts, other than "stand in line over there."

An adult (event staff and wood badge trained) loads a rocket engine into the rocket.

An adult (event staff and wood badge trained) packs the wadding and rocket recovery device.

An adult (event staff and wood badge trained)  installs electric rocket engine ignition device.

An adult (event staff and wood badge trained)  places rocket on launch pad.

An adult (event staff and wood badge trained)  aims launch pad to adjust for wind.

An adult (event staff and wood badge trained)  hooks up micro clips to the igniter.

An adult (event staff and wood badge trained)  picks one of the scouts to launch the rocket.

An adult (event staff and wood badge trained)  pushes the safety button to allow the launch button to work.

SCOUT PUSHES BUTTON!!!   

Another adult (event staff) measures the distance to target that the rocket landed and carries the rocket back. 

Later that night at the campfire (after the very long and boring Wood Badge part of the camp fire) an award is given out to the patrol that landed closest to the target. 

Girls love GSUSA,  it is run in a way that the girls like. Around here there are at least 3 times more Girl Scouts than Boy Scouts. 

Of course I live in the mountains and it is a scouting paradise and the girls get to camp and hike and do all sorts of outdoor stuff.

GSUSA really does care about running a program that the girls like.

I am part of the GSUSA myself and I see BSA changing bit by bit to be more like the GSUSA. 

I found another interesting link, it is a book review on a book about safetyism:

https://quillette.com/2018/09/02/is-safetyism-destroying-a-generation/

Here is a quote from the book review:

The dangers of safety culture

"Haidt and Lukianoff focus on the unintended consequences of safetyism – the idea that people are weak and should be protected, rather than exposed, to challenges. Safety culture has the best of intentions: protect kids from danger. It began with a focus on physical safety – removing sharp objects and choke hazards, requiring child seats, and not letting children walk home alone. Safety, however, has experienced substantial concept creep. It now includes emotional safety, that is, not being exposed ideas that could cause psychological distress. Taken together, the focus on physical and mental safety makes young people weaker."

It looks to me that good old patrol method scouting is going against the general direction of society.
It makes scouting less popular to people that see it as too dangerous.

On the positive side any boy that takes part in a good scouting program is going to be light years beyond his non-scout peers in ability to deal with problems and complexity.
When I see a young scout go to scout summer camp for the first time I almost always see a huge change in them for the better when they get back. 

I hope scouting does not adopt safeyism to the point that it is no longer a life changing experience and is just a glorified one stop babysitting service for today's busy parents.