AwakeEnergyScouter

Saw this today, adding it here in case this scanner tip is helpful to someone out there keeping scouts safe.

Sounds like looking for lenses is the best way. Also makes sense in that you can't get rid of the lens no matter how small the electronics are.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/22/how-to-find-a-hidden-camera-in-a-hotel-room-or-house-we-tested-5-ways-.html

I earned a sewing merit badge that included sewing on my badges on my own scout shirt, so after that pride wouldn't let any of us have our parents sew the badges on anymore. (You could definitely tell at that point if we'd done it ourselves or not.)

Just a tip to offload parents and encourage independence 😉

I'm not buying any badge glue, environmentally unfriendly plastic badge holders, or paying someone at council to sew my scout's badges on. No, I will sew theirs on the old-fashioned way that prepares you for life, so that mastering the skill yourself instead of working around your lack of it is the bar set for my scout. They now have my old knife, they'll get my needles too when they're ready 😂

Re: parental permissions - mine is only a cub, but digital parental policies are a hot topic at birthday parties and there is definitely a whole contingent of parents who will refuse to give scouts phones until they're older teenagers and will balk at Discord and a lot of social media and messaging apps. What can work will depend a fair bit on the scouts' parents' digital policies in addition to scouts' preferences so it might make sense to ask about that to avoid wasting time and/or making some scouts feel like "everybody" is allowed in corners of the Internet that they're not. (If momentum builds around a tool that some scouts are explicitly forbidden from using.)

Things are always coming together, and things are always falling apart.

It sounds like you've done more than your part to serve scouts. Thank you, and scout salute! 🫡

If it helps, here is a historian to point him to to back up what SSScout said.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/572005

https://www.jstor.org/stable/572003

These are publicly available previews of an argument among historians about us and BP. As a scout yourself, you'll know who's right.

Thank you for protecting your scouts and the movement as a whole.

Please don't throw any stones, but what was so dangerous about making the raft and sailing it? Is that a heavily trafficked shipping lane with oceangoing ships or something? I did the same thing at summer camp as an ordinary landlubber scout with the difference that we sailed a lake. Patrol competition. It was super fun. Still seems safe to me. We all had horseshoe collar life vests, and of course we were about to be missed and immediately spotted if the raft were to fall apart out on the lake.

Oh, wow. I thought @Eagle94-A1 meant MBO without proper regard to scouting culture but you don't need to have been a scout to know embezzlement and fraud is wrong 🤦🏼‍♀️

You could totally have homemade scout cookies as an upsell. All the folks who are disappointed we don't have cookies would buy.

Stupid question... Why does council care what item is sold for fundraising?

Thanks for sharing this! I didn't know about Totor. And that tent sketch looks awfully familiar. How touching!

YMMV, of course, but if I were in your shoes I would take the tack of what you said earlier about not crushing their enthusiasm for scouting and just focus on getting the right number of the right people in the kitchen. Then again it's really hard for me to see the problem with everyone scouting together since that's my status quo. The lack of patrol method, however, is most certainly a real problem for their scouting experience.

15 minutes ago, Maboot38 said:

I get the sense that the girl SM (...) and the girls really don't want to be extracted from the rest of the scouts in our town. 

Makes sense. Why go to lots of trouble to segregate yourselves from your fellow scouts?

This doesn't seem to be an everyone together problem, this seems to be a too many cooks of the wrong kind in the kitchen problem.

Welcome!

What is happening instead of the patrol method?

I'm only here because of the good, strong moderation. Unmoderated sites turn into nasty cesspools good for nothing real quick. Doing something constructive, therefore, requires moderation.

Thank you, @RememberSchiff. 

49 minutes ago, Tron said:

To the point of dual citizenship; our government does not recognize dual citizenship, you are either American or you are not.

The leader is question wasn't a US citizen at all, which is what the question was about, but since I've had to look at this myself I happen to know that this isn't accurate. The US government does recognize dual citizenships.

https://www.usa.gov/dual-citizenship

I wouldn't be too upset about the lack of pledge, oath, and law unless the leader really should have seen with their own eyes that this is actually expected by your unit for some time.

You didn't say where the leader is from, but I personally have... unfortunate, shall we say? associations to groups of people standing in front of a flag pledging allegiance to it with some kind of hand salute, or even groups of children all reciting some promise all together with a hand salute. That style of expressing national loyalty became taboo in some countries after 1945. It can be hard to mentally retool. It's like the squirrely nude or (!) clothed North Americans in saunas, they just can't consciously decide to relax nude in the sauna without practice.

I... struggle with the format. I can manage, because intellectually I know US Americans don't associate to the same things, but want to say things like "but democracy is very important! Speak your mind! Think for yourself! Question authority! Don't just go along with leaders who ask you to do immoral things! You'd tell me to get bent if I asked you do do something you think is dodgy, right?? Patriotism is to protect the principles your country stands for, not the individuals in leadership!" and so on, and soon, should I say what comes into my mind, I will have undermined all of my own authority that I'm trying to use for good, so I don't say it. But I think it every time.

My scout and I did the same thing last year when the pack did a MOP project. Makes sense 😄

These awards are great. I hope they've done a good job with translating them into adventures for next year. Waiting for that bit of the new program clarification to drop.

1 hour ago, OaklandAndy said:

Our Pack is actually starting this at the beginning of 2024. I didn't even know about it until I was doing some research on different awards for our scouts. I doubt the councils even know much about it either. I'm hoping we can bring more awareness to it and other units will participate. 

I assume the International Spirit Award? Fantastic! We're doing it as a pack too.

Since it's so easy for me to help scouts with it, I'm helping not just my pack but another pack in town with it. I taught them not any two games but two campfire games, and it turns out that the scout promise and motto is exactly ten words in Swedish 😄

At the next campout, they will get the opportunity to cook reindeer chafing. (Vegetarian, solves both the reindeer meat supply problem this far south and everyone needs to eat problem.)

We're also going to spend more time on BP himself and the worldwide scouting movement at Blue & Gold.

If you're starting in January you already have a plan, no doubt, but I'm happy to help if I can. The other pack wanted to make it more real with a visit from someone who was a scout in a different country, and while I imagine I can't visit your pack maybe I can help make it more real for them in some other way if we put our heads together.

Worth noting in what way? Not sure I understand what you're pointing to.

1 hour ago, yknot said:

I think the arctic fox numbers you cite are for parts of Scandinavia where they are doing poorly. Elsewhere they are doing OK.

You're right! If I search in Swedish I get critically endangered, if I search in English I get least concern even from the same parent organization like WWF. Both sources do specify for what range, but neither mention that the situation is rather different in and out of the Nordic arctic.

So, if the current efforts to save our arctic foxes take a turn for the worse, there's somewhere else you could try to reintroduce them from. Wonderful that there's a plan B.

Who's going to enforce those per capita limits and how?

I have heard many people suggest that in conversation.

I see us scouts as upholders of what's left of the old ways and part of the conscious movement to bring them with us into the future. We are not separate from nature, and nature is not separate from us. It is most unwise to forget this inherited wisdom from our ancestors. 

Poetically speaking, we are tenders of the relationships of our societies to the land spirits. We visit, connect, and return to protect. Or, at least, we should.

To save the polar bears, we need to restore their habitat - the sea ice. They are dependent on the sea ice for hunting their food - no sea ice, no polar bear food. Many other arctic animals are struggling to adjust, but none as hard as the polar bear because restoring that ice is... Challenging. I won't spell it out but we all know the only way to make more ice.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/146023/polar-bears-struggle-as-sea-ice-declines

I'll also note there are only an estimated 450 Arctic foxes left, meaning that there are way more pieces of outdoor clothing and gear with logos of arctic foxes than actual arctic foxes. But there are more things we can do to help them with the increased encroachment from the red fox into their habitats at least.

https://www.naturskyddsforeningen.se/artiklar/lar-dig-mer-om-fjallraven/

26 minutes ago, InquisitiveScouter said:

the asking of serious questions?

Are you truly confused about what to believe, then? 

I definitely can't speak for real Americans but because the mere existence of anthropogenic climate change isn't in real question in Sweden it is hard for me to imagine what kind of an intellectual-emotional journey ordinary Americans who think otherwise are on. The real Americans probably have a better idea but for me this is an element of culture shock probably compounded by that we hold STEM professionals in high cultural esteem. We see ourselves as a nation of scientists and engineers, probably not unrelated to where we are in the Inglehart-Welzel World Cultural Map. 

1 hour ago, yknot said:

2 hours ago, Eagle1993 said:

One could argue that reducing CO2 is very much in line with leave no trace and the outdoor code. 

Kind of how I see it. Maintaining a livable planet isn't political it's survival. 

This is exactly how I see it.

Can't Build a Better World without maintaining the status quo close enough to pre-industrial levels for most people to continue their locales and lifestyles with modifications. 

Continuing to emit CO2 like we have been is the opposite of being conservation-minded. Doing the good turn of all good turns is cutting CO2 emissions.

Some would indeed say the wrathful earth-protecting forest fairies have awakened, and it is precisely the upsetting of the global balance that's caused this. We best pacify them quickly and thoroughly by making the needed real CO2 emissions cuts (with no funny math).