packsaddle

Lisa, in our area, on a school-by-school basis (policy determined by school board or, in some cases, the principal), there is often a policy which excludes any such recruitment unless it is a school-sponsored or school/classroom-related activity. This allows school sports recruiting and things like school field trips, but excludes all external organizations and interests. It saves classroom time and distractions from the business at hand, or at least that's what I've been told.

"His first year at college was more about redoing stuff that he had or should have done in H.S than anything else." This resonates with me because I see it often. The engineering program has an entire 'academic success' effort to try to help students overcome the deficiencies, primarily in math, physics, chemistry. If I get fired, it's probably because I opened my big mouth once too often on this subject. My opinion is that those students should not be admitted at all. And here's the dirty little secret: a lot of them are home-schooled. We don't usually find out about this until much later and I don't know if good statistics are kept but that is what I'm told. But if they don't measure up to the admission standards which would place them in a path to success in regular courses, they should not be admitted, no matter who they are.

There seems to be an element of 'local option' for this. In this council the boys only list the references. It is left to the council to contact those references for letters, if they so choose. So far, I have never seen one of those references contacted (I've been directly involved with about 50 or so Eagle candidates). BUT, I have read elsewhere in these threads accounts in which local councils (maybe districts) do ask the boys to provide letters up front. I'm guessing that the reasons also vary from locality to locality. That said, the way I interpret it (and this is one of those things on which I agree with the council) is that the letters are not required up front...just references, as stated fairly clearly on the application.

Heh, heh, not often. You do have a point regarding celebrity. I would add that the concept of celebrity itself, and what we identify as celebrity, is symptomatic as well - that might be your point. But a few of the prize winners are also really good at communicating to the public...or at least entertaining in various ways. I remember listening in shock to Shockley, admiration to Feynman, fascination to Watson. But most of them would be too boring for a public which mostly expects Jerry Springer.

I have a theory about the original topic of this thread. I think we can all agree that we have - at various times - had some marginal leadership at many, if not all, levels of government. We probably don't agree on who those were. That's ok. Here's the basis of the theory: The founding fathers created a system of government that is so capable of surviving lousy leaders, so full of self-correcting mechanisms, so inherently stable, that we can hire morons to lead us and the system will continue to work. Perhaps not perfectly but well enough to survive hundreds of years of assault by those morons. Still agreed? My theory is that this allows us the freedom to actually ELECT morons, figuratively speaking. And our understanding of this fundamental strength of our system causes us to conclude: "Hey, what's the need for high standards of education, if even morons can get elected to positions of leadership?" or something along those lines. And therefore, as a society, we tend not to think of intellect as something that is necessary or even all that desirable. In short, the wisdom and intellect of the founding fathers led them to create a system which has unintentionally spawned a society that sees little value in intellect. Nice.

"Packsaddle, tell us... do those fellows dutifully follow da BSA's position on Leave No Trace?" That smiley indicates you didn't ask this with a straight face and that's a good thing. No. They mostly don't even go places where LNT would apply but might, if they had the chance, run over it with some kind of 4WD monstrosity. Maybe even shoot something. I've noticed over the years, that lack of regard for fellow man tends to go hand in hand for lack of regard for pretty much everything else, the environment included. This makes 'the gay policy' just that more incongruous for an organization which has legitimate claim to so many other high ideals. I'm hoping BSA will come around eventually. And those guys...you're right, they'll feel the way they feel regardless of what comes along.

"Packsaddle, tell us... do those fellows dutifully follow da BSA's position on Leave No Trace?" That smiley indicates you didn't ask this with a straight face and that's a good thing. No. They mostly don't even go places where LNT would apply but might, if they had the chance, run over it with some kind of 4WD monstrosity. Maybe even shoot something. I've noticed over the years, that lack of regard for fellow man tends to go hand in hand for lack of regard for pretty much everything else, the environment included. This makes 'the gay policy' just that more incongruous for an organization which has legitimate claim to so many other high ideals. I'm hoping BSA will come around eventually. And those guys...you're right, they'll feel the way they feel regardless of what comes along.

Beavah, again I'm not painting this policy with the 'intentions' of being hateful on the part of the national organization. I actually think they're simply and perhaps uncomfortably going for the money. But when I sit around REAL campfires and listen to the stuff I sometimes hear from scouters, and not just about gays, "hateful" is the term YOU would ascribe to it as well. This policy facilitates real hate in individuals and anoints their prejudice with official sanction, in their minds, by the national organization. In that sense, I consider the policy to be hateful.

Lisa, he's not doing this to beat YOU over the head, so don't take it so hard. Beavah's wielding that 2x4 because he's trying to wake up SeattlePioneer. But what he's really doing is not casting aspersions...he's casting pearls. And SeattlePioneer is making my case. The Tea Party will succeed in their unintentional 'plan' by obstructing - and NOTHING will get done. It simply IS what it IS.

I offer one case in opposition to Trevorum's one case. I consider the policy to be exclusive, intolerant, and hateful. And I am still a member. Moreover, BSA allows me to continue to be a member. It's still an exclusive, intolerant, hateful policy however...IMO. What I don't get is how an argument that starts out as something founded in a particular view of morality so quickly transforms into an argument about numbers and money. Why not just stick with the moral argument if that's what it's really all about? But NOOOOO, we have to justify the continuation of the policy on the basis of how much monetary impact might occur if the policy changed. To be true to the moral position, there should be no consideration of membership numbers or money at all...even if the long term impact was that BSA would be whittled down to a marginalized shadow of its former self, viewed as a fringe organization of extremists (and let's face it, that view is more and more common these days). At least, in that case, the organization would still be true to its principles.

SR540, Right you are. All of the Birthers I know are part of the Tea Party but not necessarily the other way round.

No...here's the really sad truth: It's just as fast as it was the day you bought it. Not something many of us can say about ourselves....

Beavah, I wanted that to appear ambivalent. What I didn't expect was for you to be the first to respond. I'm on the side of the market here. Of course I see the need to promote STEM fields. However, those are greatly enhanced by the ability to express ideas and communicate effectively (liberal arts). Society is enhanced when there is a broader appreciation (as Steve understood) outside strictly technical details, also liberal arts. Life is bigger than a gas turbine. (Sorry, recently in a turbine manufacturing facility) I support letting market forces control the flow into different fields, as opposed to agenda-driven political decisions. Students and families can view the broader situation in terms of immediate needs and future trends and then make their own best decisions about where to focus their interests. Market forces will make these opportunities and needs apparent and individuals can make their best choices freely. Bad decisions will be quickly corrected by that same market. I am opposed to politicians making these decisions FOR the people. I especially oppose it when, as seems to be the trend, those politicians are profoundly ignorant of both education and the consequences of their decisions. If, for some market reason, a huge number of Floridians see bright futures as anthropologists (or any other field) then a governor should support THEIR needs as expressed by their choices, not HIS political interests. I stood in the presence of a governor a while back, while several educators received awards for their achievements and contributions to public education at all levels. The only words that governor could find for this occasion were to complain that his college-age child was considering NOT attending an Ivy League school in favor of a public university. What a guy! He was ignorant of education, including STEM..and, evidently, the concept of tact. This governor was profoundly incompetent to make decisions regarding education in his state and yet he did, to the detriment of public education at all levels. Florida may be about to enjoy similar favors from theirs. Edit: Shortridge, I understand your message. Part of that is the 'greener grass' tendency. I think you'll agree that while becoming a top-notch welder would bring a job and groceries to the table, it might not provide the broad view needed to assess that job market or to invest wisely for the future. I could say the same thing, for example, for someone who never set his/her mind outside the chemistry lab. I think this is one of the reasons that BP saw the need for broad experiences in scouting. I see it reflected in the breadth of requirements for advancement, always requiring service, technical skills, and reflection. I'd have to say it has more in common with the liberal arts than STEM.(This message has been edited by packsaddle)

"You know, we don't need a lot more anthropologists in the state. It's a great degree if people want to get it, but we don't need them here. I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, math degrees. That's what our kids need to focus all their time and attention on. Those type of degrees. So when they get out of school, they can get a job." OK, I'm going to sweeten this deal by giving you a link to Mother Jones. The thought of some of you actually following that link is just delicious. http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/10/rick-scott-liberal-arts-majors-drop-dead-anthropology He must be kidding...who else is going to ask if we want to supersize our orders? Archeologists?

I have a family member from NY whose birth certificate has no name on it. This is the so-called, 'long form' birth certificate. Back when all the idiotic claims were being made about Obama, I asked them what the heck happened to them? Evidently, and this is what they told me after they asked around a while, for some range of years in NY, if a parent didn't have a name for the child at the time the form was filled out, the name was just left blank. On that infamous 'Long Form'. I know this is true because I saw the actual certificate. This evidently caused quite some trouble for this person while attempting to get a passport. But the 'Certificate of Birth' which was so questionable to the Tea Party types DID have this person's name, so they were able to prevail and now have the passport. The 'Long Form' certificate still has no name on it. So I had to ask..."do you think you'll ever run for President?". Reason I asked: this person had claimed with great concern that Obama was not an American citizen because he didn't have the so-called 'Long Form' (which he eventually produced, thus elevating this argument to nonsense about whether or not he was so-called, 'natural born' or some such). I could not help but note the irony to this person and then he got mad at me. Wow. How is any of this related to the topic? It isn't - except it's one more of those stupid claims that excitable people might get excited over if they're predisposed in some way. I have to hand it to those really clever Muslim Brotherhood types, manipulating the system IN ORDER TO discredit BSA. Naughty, naughty!

Just not hungry enough...yet.

Nope, when the conservatives start eating the liberals, suddenly it will only be conservatives in line.

Vol, you misunderstand me. To me the Tea Party is a symptom. WE are the ones who are avoiding a plan so WE have 'manufactured' the Tea Party to deliver this fate. WE already had a truly bipartisan debt commission which WE have simply ignored. WE have decided instead to create a 'new' commission, only this time we'll get it RIGHT and this commission, this time, will fail to create a plan - which IS the plan. The only real obstacle left is to figure out a way to circumvent those across-the-board cuts that are supposed to happen as a result. 9.8m/sec**2.

THAT brought a smile to my face! Thanks. Yes, individual persons and even groups of people can make moral decisions and act in moral ways. I agree. On the other hand, markets, as you described later (re: $400x10**12 in exposure), continue to demonstrate the lack of any kind of moral compass. As for the question as to whether or not they're too big to allow to fail? That experiment was carried out already and we proved that they have good reason to think they're too big to allow to fail. Bush and Obama demonstrated that principle empirically a couple of years ago. Even later, your description of the TPers approach tends to support my contention that their plan (witness how unlikely the NEW debt commission is to decide anything whatsoever) IS not to have a plan (think of them as uber-anarchists). Now I don't think they have decided this consciously. I think this is one of the 'emergent properties' that is the outcome of 'irreducibly complex' systems, regardless of how smart or stupid the individual components are. (wasn't that nice, the way I attached the Intelligent Design thing to the TP?) Viola! The Tea Party is here by divine mandate to provide divine intervention! Or so my Confederate Flag waving, Christian racist neighbor claims. And who am I to question his claim? Just the guy who works on Sunday and I suppose conforms to HIS model of a person who has no moral compass. And that's 'closure', whatever that is.

Basement, what planet....never mind. There is nothing about the market that CARES about anything...other than optimizing the efficiency of transactions. The market is amoral. It has no sense of future or purpose or decency outside its own existence, driven by selfish interest. There is no reason to expect bankers or 'systems' to 'care' about anyone or anything other than their own self interest. That is the American economic system. It is the unseen hand and the magic of the marketplace and it doesn't 'care'. And anyone who EXPECTS 'caring' is delusional.

Hey man, you must have missed that part about me keeping the slide rules. Sorry. But you're welcome to the computer junk. Tampa, that thing was sold under both Sinclair and Timex brands but they were the same computer. $99 for a working computer (sans monitor). Not bad. It needed accessories (like that tape player) but it worked. And it had BASIC built in too. I remember visiting a colleague at UVa. He had adapted an IBM Selectric typewriter to one of those Vic 20's. I was incredibly envious. Got a couple of old Selectrics too! Continued to use them even after getting the daisy wheel. Our dept chair decided he liked the old Ohio Scientific computers, back when every brand had their own proprietary version of DOS. So I got one of those as well. At that time, EVERYONE had a version and they all had some kind of compatibility problem with the others. What a mess! Bill Gates was sucking profit from them all. Gotta give the guy credit. He worked that system masterfully. But most of my serious work was done on a terminal to the mainframe. Serious stuff, you know, like the Startrek game in which there were no graphics at all. You had to use the slide rule to quickly calculate the predicted position of the Romulans in 3D and then to target them with the right dispersion of photon torpedos. Gad, I can probably still do that too!

I actually do have one or two of those Clive Sinclair machines someplace. I added 64K of RAM and a custom interface with a small 12V monitor so I could use it in the field, powered by a car battery, to log data from a thermal array. I programmed it using machine code to automatically log data at chosen time intervals and then I'd 'write' the stored data to the tape drive and print it later. I also have the Sinclair printer. The biggest challenge was programming the 12bit A/D I built to convert the signals and embedding that within the timing loops. Gad, I can probably still operate that thing! I never got around to writing a driver for anything like a disk drive but I understand that a few others did. We also had similar setups with Commodore 64's, but I preferred the code for the Z80 as opposed to the 6502. Talk about wasted youth! I was looking at my old slide rules just yesterday. Two of the Rolls Royces (the K&E and the Post) and a Chevy (the Pickett). Still work as well as new. If you'll send me a PM with your address, I'd love to unload all that junk to a loving home. I'll throw in the shards of some really old Apple products as well. I think I still have a 5.25" floppy drive someplace.....some old XT keyboards...a mini-solid state XT...a lot of sensors and photomultipliers...some old cases, who knows what's in them. I'll keep the slide rules. Edit: I mowed lawns for an entire summer to earn enough money to buy a 6-transistor radio ($25). And then broke it within a month. Also had the crystal radio set (actually still have a version of that using a precision crystal now - it's called a receiver). Drove a school bus in high school a the age of 16. I was paid $20 per month. I was in HS when court-ordered busing began in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System. Interesting times.(This message has been edited by packsaddle)

Yep, the Darwinian approach is definitely the best approach. It's just too bad if the stupidity of 'other' children causes them to be born into poverty.

Sorry, while I do not take this OWS thing at all seriously (sorry Eamonn and Beavah, I just don't see whatever it is you see there), I do see the comparison to the Tea Party, at least the members I know. We had a chance to actually begin to pay down the debt at one time, and a lot of the people I know who claim to be members of the Tea Party today clamored loudly NOT to pay down the debt but rather to get tax cuts. The empty promise then, as now, was that those cuts would help create jobs. And, of course they were right about those jobs...in other countries. That is water under the bridge now. But when those same persons complain loudly today about the national debt and fiscal responsibility, I'm sorry. I see it as disingenuous. I see it as little more than, as Beavah noted, keeping millions out of work to put one man out of a job. This is nothing more than a continuation of the selfish political interest that put us in this situation in the first place. I part from Beavah, however, in my continued claim that all we have to do is glance over our shoulder briefly and we can see that cliff receding at 9.8 m/sec**2 in the distance, as the gravity of our past decisions works its marketplace magic and accelerates us toward the consequences. It doesn't matter who is at the wheel now. We are hurtling to an outcome that has already been set in motion and all we seem to be able to do is continue to fight pointless, empty, stupid fights for pointless, empty, stupid political advantage. We are going to get the government, economy, and society we demanded long ago...and deserve. Have a nice day!

Kendall Oil, Gulf Oil, Atlantic Oil, Humble Oil, Cities Service, Pure Oil...."you can be sure if it's Pure". Oil in cans, the cardboard came years later. A full set of new tires for $60. All gasoline was leaded except for Amoco 'White Gas'. Gasoline for 20cents a gallon. Wizard outboard motors. The air 'breathers' for the engine air intake that sucked the air through a pool of oil. Filing the points to give them new life. Driving around the entire United States on a 6-week family camping trip...no interstate highways, no KOA, camping in whatever wayside spots we could find. We had no TV but an AM radio with two stations that I knew of. Saturday morning I listened to Gil 'Who' Mahoney and his magical Leprechaun band. The first TV was a 12" Motorola, B&W, and there was one station (CBS) - Andy Devine's gang "plunk your magic twanger, Froggy" (sponsored by Buster Brown shoes), Captain Midnight (sponsored by Ovaltine), Boston Blackie, etc. A few years later a second station started up (NBC) - Sky King, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, Cisco Kid. I remember electric trolleys, wiggling my toes in the fluoroscope in the shoe section of the department store, 5 cents for a coca-cola and outraged when they went to 6 cents. Getting my polio shot and a couple of years later getting the oral version as well (required by the government for every student for you anti-goverment persons). Wood and canvas canoes at scout camp. Real canvas tents with no mosquito netting, no floors. No such thing as a pack frame if you didn't make it yourself. Sleeping bags stuffed with Kapok. Life preservers with cork. Making my own fishing lures from wood and feathers and catching saltwater trout with them. I remember Eisenhower running against Stevenson and later Eisenhower giving THAT speech. I remember my cousin going to Korea, I remember having to take a ferry to Sanibel Island...and once we got there, almost no people. I remember the small of DDT, the rainwater cistern and drinking it with mosquito larvae in it. I remember the puzzlement of adults when I couldn't tan but rather would get blistering sunburns time after time. No such thing as sunscreen. I remember the wringer washer on the back porch and pants stretchers as clothes hung on the line. I also remember getting my arm caught in that wringer and being saved at the last moment by my mother. I remember taking a 14' skiff out to the mouth of Shark River and camping on a trapper's roost. I remember a no-limit catch for cutthroat trout out west. I remember when there was a small, unassuming visitor center for Mt. Rushmore, when Bedloe's Island had the Statue of Liberty and Cape Canaveral was just another spot on the Florida coast. I remember when snuff was a fine powder of flavored tobacco which was mostly used by women whose spit aim was astounding (they nevertheless had a permanent brown stain around one side of their dress) and it was aggressively advertised on TV "...if your snuff's too strong it's wrong, buy Tube Rose, mild Tube Rose..." And I remember an escalating series of changes in society that got meaner and meaner as the civil rights movement built its momentum. Not all memories are all that great.