Mr. Boyce

I rather like the above idea. Much to be said for a neckerchief and slide approach.

Interesting thread. Back when I was young, my family did next to nothing when it came to my scouting involvement. It was actually a good thing, opened up a chance for me to learn to be an adult and stand on my own two feet. Something to be said for this.

My new shirt's filled with gussets and tussets, billows and loopy things here and there. I'm tempted to buy some cloth and find a good tailor and have a shirt made for me without all the extraneous stuff.

Outsourced: I greatly appreciate your time writing down your experience with the BSA. I ran across a poll recently that cited that 62% of American consumers are willing to pay more for American-made items. I am, too. Interesting to note that the Storage Industry has been booming, as people need more room for the excess Asian junk they bought. "Less of stuff, but better stuff" has been my mantra.

I'm amazed at these stories. My take on it (what do you think?) is that this "issue" is a bit contrived. . . it allows government employees to "prove" to the public their "professional expertise" about such things. "I am more professional than you, since I can recognize this danger, and you do not!" It's a way of asserting authority. I tell people of the crap I used to carry to junior high school in the 70s and they're shocked. For me, a pocket knife, etc., were just toys to buddy me through the long school day.

Special opportunities for older scouts and high adventure. The transitioning of Cubs to Scouts. Keeping the Scout Oath and Motto, through transient pressures.

re: topic: BORING! Expect the Australians to lose scouts and lose relevance.

I'm tired of liberal politicians who get elected and jack around with all this nonsense. The nation's severely stressed. So they want to re-arrange the deck chairs. Some fix!

DOA

God bless Merlin! I love the stuff he finds and posts!

Despite the nonsense of recent presidents and their policies, it's good to be an American.

The youth members recognize the OA lodge flap on the uniform. This works. Keep the sash for just OA stuff. It can come across as pretentious otherwise. . . and make others wonder, "hey, there's an OA function here."

I'll tell you, I'm so tired of hearing all this "gay, gay, gay" stuff. Why isn't the OP considered a troll with this stuff?

Let's see, let's try a vast social experiment without really knowing what the phenomenon is all about.

Be kind to him and drop the "playing boyscouts" stuff. He and everybody else are earnest.

Worth considering here is the fact that male youth often WANT to find a non-familial adult male as a role model. So it goes. We also should be leery about making scouting a big family thing: there is much to be said about helping youth learn to stand on their own two feet and represent themselves as their own individual. Developmental psychology is a good thing to know about.

re: original post contents. . . mehh! BSA members/leaders need to simply acknowledge that sports have been so professionalized that they drown out all other contenders for kids' time. And schools also have originated new kinds of programs, including programming that steps on the toes of the BSA's main deal, the outdoors.

"Inclusivity" and "multiculturalism" are overrated; kind of 90s, don't you think?

My so-called lifestyle really LIKES having constitutional rights, so I will not be voting for the Big BO this time. While I like the idea of national healthcare and it is needed, our nation should not be in the business of taxpayer funded abortions, or forcing religious organizations to violate their consciences. Our Current Occupant forgets the importance of constitutional rights. And these are important to my lifestyle.

Rough stab here: take a look at the general population; there will be some very high skill/intelligence/ability people and there will be some very low skill/low functioning people. Most of us are in the middle. The bulk of jobs the country needs are for most people, not the handful of intellectuals/professionals. And such jobs themselves have a much lower spill-over of ancillary, connected jobs.

As a scout I was a big fan of neckerchiefs and neckerchief slides. I liked the option of picking for myself what neckerchief I'd wear (you used to get these, like patches, at activities, they'd come in different designs and colors, etc.), and then I'd have a current favorite neckerchief slide. I have a few of my old neckerchief slides still around, a couple of good ones I carved and painted. We as scouts never poo-poohed the neckerchief, but just wore it. I'm not sure where the anti-neckerchief message came from. I like neckerchiefs. The bolo, to me, looks like something a geezer out in the sun states would wear while he's sitting in front of his RV.

Good post, BadenP. I'm upping the ante: I'll pay 20% more for US.

It's not traditional. It's khaki and has shoulder epaulets that are useless; it also doesn't permit the traditional scout neckerchief. Are neckerchiefs outre in Texas? I'm not a fan of bulging side pockets on pants; I've got a rucksack or fanny pack for stuff that works much better, no banging on my sides! TOO MANY patches make the uniform look crappy. End with the "trained" patches and such, just retain rank patches.

Many years back I wanted to run to be a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, but learned, to my great distress, that the party practiced gender quotas in delegate selection. . . which effectively cancelled out my possibilities. I felt then, and do now, that such things are wrong. What was especially egregious is that the party had never discriminated against women in the past, and, indeed, had had female convention delegates well before women even had the right to vote!

Is there a precedence or priority in placing knots on a uniform shirt? For instance, does a rank award go ahead of, say, a training knot? Or do you just place them in whatever order you want to? Or is it chronological?