CalicoPenn

There's a word for doing the same thing expecting a different result....

In the spirit of Seattle's positing a scenario where a crew member is pregnant one week and not the next, I have another scenario to ponder: 16-year old female crew member shows up pregnant one week and is booted out. What do you do when a 19-year old female crew member shows up pregnant?

The Rules and Regulations of the Boy Scouts of America describe proficiency as a general principle, not as a requirement. Howver, it also says that there shall be four steps in Boy Scout advancement procedure: learning, testing, reviewing and recognition. So I suppose that does mean "we need steenkin tests". Or does it? Maybe it gets down to semantics. What is testing? What do people think of when they see the word test? I've stated I think of rigorous skills testing and pen and paper exams as tests. On the other hand, my letting the Scout show off his skills while listening and observing is just a different form of a test? And what about proficiency? As i've said, it's a principle, but not a requirement - and I suspect the reason it isn't a requirement is because the BSA doesn't want to define what qualifies as proficient. So what say us? What if proficiency wasn't a principle, but was a requirement? What is proficient? In cooking, you can create meals that meet nutritional needs just by boiling water. You can make oatmeal, boiled eggs, pasta, veggies, all kinds of food, just by boiling water. You can meet the cooking requirements simply by planning a menu based around meals that just require boiling water. But does the ability to boil water and cook food in boiling water really meet a definition of proficiency in cooking? I don't think so - but the requirement was met. Should I not sign off on the requirement because the work doesn't meet my definition of proficiency in cooking?

To paraphrase a famous quotation: "Tests? Tests?? We don't need no steenkin tests". 1) The Scout Learns 2) The Scout Completes the Requirement The Scout demonstrates, shows, does, reports, discusses, prepares, creates, etc. etc. I've yet to see a requirement that says "pass a test". Maybe it's because when I think of a "test", I think of someone sitting in a room with paper and pencil answering questions, or being subjected to a rigourous examination of skills. Perhaps it's just a matter of semantics. If the Scout is looking for a sign-off on a bowline, he asks for a sign off, demonstrates that he can tie a bowline, and tells about the uses of a bowline. I listen, I observe. I'm not testing. I'm watching/listening to a Scout show off. If the Scout shows me he can tie the knot, and gives me good examples of its use, he gets signed off. If he's struggling with the knot, I help him get past where he's not getting it, letting him go practice, and wait for him to show off again. If he gets the sign off this week and struggles to tie a bowline down the road, I'm going to be trying to figure out where the program is failing to provide opportunities to practice the skills. I see testing as tossing the Scout a piece of rope and telling him to tie a bowline. Testing makes it all seem so formal. That's just not my style. And it certainly has no place in a Board of Review. I also don't see anything that requires one to be proficient in a skill to get a sign off. I tend to think of someone with advanced skills as being proficient, and proficiency most often comes with continued use, not continued practice. In my opinion, it's not enough to practice a clove hitch over and over again to become proficient at it - to be really proficient at it, you have to use the clove hitch often in real life situations, to really understand a clove hitch - that's advanced skills - that's proficiency.

Moxie, In my day, the Outdoor Rec majors at Unity College in Unity, Maine had a tradition of registering for Spring Semester classes in January wearing shorts. We didn't sing carols around a barbie but usually listened to the Dead while playing hackey sack in the parking lot. The macho Con-Law guys came bundled up in parkas.

Richie Rich was (is) a Boy Scout, but I don't think he ever got old enough in the comics to become an Eagle Scout. If I remember correctly, Richard Rish Sr. was both an Eagle Scout and a Scoutmaster, and Cadbury was a Queens Scout. Ya know, I'm seeing a trend here - something to do with Harvey Comics.

Caspar the Friendly Ghost was (is) a Cub Scout - and he's a pretty friendly fellow.

Are you sure this is a case of an unreliable parent and not of a parent who doesn't know how to tell you that her son doesn't want to be a Cub Scout anymore?

"Don't make the mistake of thinkin' it was the BOR that caused it. It's never da real reason." Unless it was the real reason (not neccessarily disagreeing with Beavah that it might not be but I am disagreeing with the absolute "Never" because we should all know by now that absolutes aren't usually defensible). Given the feedback you shared that he wasn't made to feel welcome from the get go and that he felt badgered by repetitive questions, it seems he might have looked at how the BOR members treated him and came to the conclusion that no matter how much he worked on his own issues, it wouldn't make a whit of difference to the folks that served on his BOR. Something happened in that BOR to make him distrust the members of the BOR enough to believe that he would never get a fair shake in your Troop. It doesn't take long for respect to be lost - and based on the feedback from the BOR (that he didn't show the BOR respect) and from the Scout (that the BOR wouldn't accept his answers) I suspect that this was not a case of a Scout not going into the BOR with a lack of respect but of the members of the BOR acting in some manner that caused the lad to lose respect for them. Now most of us can hide our new-found disdain for people who we have suddenly lost respect for - at least long enough to be socially graceful until we can exit the situation - teenagers are still learning those skills. Keep in mind this too. Fathers who are experienced (and I assume you also mean trained) ASM's generally don't let their sons just transfer to a different Troop when they hit what some might see as a minor bump in the road. Especially fathers that aren't angry about their son's not "passing" a BOR. And boys don't leave Troops where they like and respect their Scoutmasters (as it appears he does in your case) over what some might percieve as a minor bump in the road. Something happened in that BOR to turn that Scout out of your Troop. A wise Scoutmaster would spend time over the course of the next few months to have a post-BOR SM Conference to gather feedback from the Scouts that go through the process. If their are bumps in the BOR process, this is the only way you're going to find out what it is. One last thing - you haven't just lost this Scout and an experienced ASM. You've gained the potential to lose more Scouts - friends of this Scout who may decide to follow him to his new Troop.

I read that paragraph from that parent and no where in it do I see mention that the parent corrected the problem. I see where the parent did the troubleshooting (and in the real world, most of us, if we believe we've done things correctly and it still isn't functioning, will ask someone else to take a look and see if they can figure out the problem) but it doesn't say the parent then fixed the problem. Yet I certainly see that some folks imediately fixated on the parent as a problem. And if my memory serves me correctly (and I'm pretty sure in this case it does), the crystal radio I built from a kit when I was a Cub Scout just barely worked too. But then "just barely worked" was in comparison to the little blue cub scout transistor radio I had gotten at Christmas (anyone remember those?). If I didn't have a transistor radio to compare it to, I might have thought the crystal radio was working just great.

You're right Mr. Boyce - the issue is too much Political Correctness. Why, we've all been so PC on the thread that no one has mentioned the elephant in the room. If the picture that started this whole discussion was of a white woman, we wouldn't be having this discussion. And on the off chance that we were discussing it, we would be discussing the woman's main point, which isn't that she won't be getting heat assistance but that the process to apply was not fair. Instead of a proper application process for the heat assistance grants (which may have ruled her out anyway), grants were just given to the first 250 or so people that were in line to apply. Maybe the person 10 back in line from her was even more needy than the first 250-odd people - but no one will know because that person didn't get a chance to apply either, and there was no needs-based evaluation system set up. Now I'm not suggesting there were racial motivations in this posting - but I am suggesting that it seems an awful lot like an attempt to resurrect the image of Ronald Reagan's mythical "Welfare Queen". And that's a divisive (and FALSE) image we shouldn't tolerate anymore.

I imagine the training is needed to prevent commanders from laughing everytime a soldier complains that a gay soldier is hitting on everyone in the barracks except him.

Yep - I think I get a pretty good picture of what is wrong with this country. A decided lack of compassion and hatred for other people. The BSA sure knew what they were doing when they used Friendly instead of Compassionate in the Scout Law. Half the volunteers wouldn't be able to live up to the Scout Law if they had.

I suggest that you have one last duty to this Troop - and by Troop, I mean the boys that are still in the Troop. Someone needs to make the Institutional Head and the COR (not just the COR) aware of what is going on in this Troop. Not the conflicts your family has had and are having with this CC & ASM but about the incident at the recent camping trip where the 17 year old son of the ASM attacked another lad on the trip - and that it has happened, with a weapon, before. And you need to bring the attacked boy and his parents along to the meeting. At this point, it's not about anger at the ASM or the CC - it's about ensuring the safety of the rest of the boys in the Troop. The easy thing to do is get angry then sit on the sidelines and do nothing because your sons are no longer in the Troop - but it isn't the right thing to do. Don't wait - contact that other boy and his parents and then contact the IH - get a meeting set up now - before the other lad hurts someone.

Oh - and I'm sorely tempted to start a thread called "Calico" in the uniforming section to see what people think of potentially using calico cloth to make the BSA uniforms. However, I also agree with OGE's reasoning, and think he's doing a great job. I would open up an OGE thread to praise him, but that would be an eponymous thread, and I respect OGE's judgment.

Wait a second here - "mas" is the "reason for the season"? I always thought the reason for the season was because the earths rotation changed plunging the northern hemisphere into a cold and monochromatic winter and bringing greenery into the house and putting up bright lights helped keep people generally happy during the darkest days of the year, and now we're being told it's all because of "mas"? And what the heck is "mas" anyway?

Your the COR of one of the largest and most successful units in the District you say? So what do you want to happen? Want these people gone? Want them put into a position where they will never impact your unit again? If I were COR of one of the largest and most successful units, and felt the District wasn't attending appropriately to my complaints, I would make one last call - to the SE - and tell him/her that until this matter was resolved to my satisfaction, the Chartering Organization's units would no longer participate in Friends of Scouting, or in Popcorn Sales, or in any District or Council event, and would be looking for Out Of Council camps to attend. If there is one thing that SE's respond pretty quickly to, it's a potential threat to their metrics.

Ok Vol - only 48% liked the bill at it's peak popularity - now tell us why? Why did 52% of the people not like the bill at it's peak of popularity? If you think you can answer that question definitively, then you are wrong. You have no way of knowing why people didn't like the bill. Now the media pundits will try to leave the impression that people don't like the bill because it has a mandatory insurance clause - but not all of that 52% dislike the bill for that reason. People on all sides of the political spectrum took a dislike to some portion of that bill, and they don't all agree on the reason they dislike the bill. 15% may tell you its because they don't like the mandatory insurance provisions while another 15% may like the mandatory insurance but not like the bill because it doesn't contain a public option. We also can't discount that there is liable to be a certain number of people who dislike the bill because Obama proposed it(and during the last administration, there were people that disliked things just because Bush proposed it). How do you take the results seriously if it doesn't answer the Why? But the real point is that polling in this way is very inaccurate. Back to the circus/clown analogy, if I ask you 15 questions about aspects of the circus, and you indicate you enjoy all of them except the clowns, would it be accurate to place you in a category of people who say they hate the circus? No, it wouldn't - you don't hate the circus, you hate clowns. The same holds true for this bill - if we polled people on the individual parts, and you had a positive reaction to 80 percent of it and a negative reaction to 20% of it, is it accurate to say you hate the bill? No, not really. You actually like most of the bill, you just dislike parts of the bill. And trying to correlate the poll results with the opinions expressed at the town hall screamfests, err meetings, is punditry, not statistical analysis.

"At summer camp, day 4, at 1 AM I get a text message to call a mom because she wants to make sure her son is alright." My reply text would have been along the lines of: "Your son was eaten by a bear 3 nights ago - we have't told you yet because we're still looking for the bear - we think we're getting closer because this afternoon we found one sneaker which we think is your sons - though to be honest, it coud be the sneaker of the boy that was eaten last week by a bear. Heck, we're not even sure if it's the same bear. Got to run, need to get back to sleep so we can resume the search tomorrow. We might find him on the canoe trip we're taking down the river that's 25 miles away from here".

"Around the passage of the bill many polls were ~60% against and this has persisted through before the last election" I'm actually a bit surprised that a scientist would accept these polls at face value in making arguments for or against a position. These type of opinion polls are notorious for never providing any real detail - they provide analysis that pretends to be detail and most people accept it, but they accept it because most people don't know any better. These polls generally don't present the questions they asked, or ask good follow-up questions to see why people are opposed. When the bill first passed, there was a pretty significant number of people wanting single payer, or at least a public option, that didn't like the bill, just as there were people who just flat out oppose government being involved at all. By stating that 60% oppose the bill, it lumps everyone together which leads the public to generate false conclusions. Particularly on a bill this complex, polling to ask if people like the bill is pretty meaningless - but a poll designed to measure true support or opposition could never be done because people will not stand for an interuption to their lives for a phone poll that takes more that 2 minutes tops to complete. If you really want to know what people think of this bill, you have to ask about the individual components. There are some hints already out there as to how that might play out - some polls have asked about specifics, and the pollsters are always "surprised" by results that indicate that people like 4 out of 5 items polled but then say they don't like the whole package. In a way it's like saying you don't like the circus when you actually like everything about the circus except the clowns.

"Yes, as a government agency it probably would be somewhat less efficient when compared to a single insurance company" During the run-up to the passage of this bill, there were a lot of claims that the government would be less efficient as the insurance companies. There was never anything presented to back that view up - it was just an opinion. Lost amongst the screaming was some checking by both right and left wing think tanks into this claim - it was found that, on average, government overhead on Medicare is a bit over 3%. Overhead for private insurance companies? A bit over 30%. This should have helped settle the issue of who is more or less efficient - but it doesn't. A lot of people just won't ever believe that government really can be more efficient than the private sector no matter what is presented to them. And there will be some who aren't able to understand the correlation between efficiency and overhead.

As I pointed out to one of my Republican friends today who was crowing about this particular victory for the Republicans, it's a bit ironic that this particular part of the bill that was found unconstitutional was suggested by the Republicans in the first place. But that's not where Beavah is trying to take this, I think. I find it hard to believe that the government can force males to register for selective service (and if you want federal college financial aid, you can forget about it if you're an 18 year old male that hasn't registered for selective service) but can't require people to buy insurance to ensure that the government, and the insured, don't have to cover the costs of the uninsured. I don't really care if the 22 year old who doesn't want insurance thinks that all he's really going to do is pay for the elderly's care because he's young and invincible - the fact is that the 22 year old is going to participate in much riskier behavior than an 88 year old, and if he breaks his spine while doing a half-pipe while snow boarding, and is uninsured, the rest of us are going to end up covering that cost. But even if it's unconstitutional for the federal government to require it, there is a way to work around that. It seems to be perfectly constitutional for States to require people to purchase auto insurance. It's also perfectly constitutional for the Federal Government to "attach strings" to funding to the states. Why did states switch to 55 miles per hour? Because federal funding was tied to the switch - if states didn't lower their speed limits, they lost funding (it has since been adjusted by Congress which is why we now see higher speed limits in certain areas). Why did states change their drinking age from 18 to 21? Because there was federal funding tied to that change. So given that, the work around is, for any state that accepts federal funding for Medicaid, require that the state ensure that all residents of the state is insured. How will the state do that? They'll require residents to purchase health insurance, just like they require residents to purchase auto insurance. And if it's consitutional for a state to require auto insurance, then it's consitutiional to for a state to require health insurance. If a state wants to opt out? Then they get no money for Medicaid - and let them figure out how to care for the indigent. And finally, can we please call this what it is - it is not health Care Reform - it is Health Insurance Reform.

William Proxmire could make fun of that insect study because no one doing the study was able to communicate at his level. And by that I mean that, as good as the researchers are, it can be hard for a lot of researchers to "dumb it down". Researchers often have trouble trying to explain what practical benefits might come of it (though that varies depending on field) - especially if they're of the "research for knowledge sake" mindset. Tell 100 farmers in Iowa that scientists are wasting taxpayer money on the mating habit of some insect they've never heard of, and they'll probably agree that the money is being wasted. The researchers have to be able to stand up and tell the Iowa farmers, in Iowa Farmer terms, that the study could help us prevent corn borers from being able to lay eggs that will hatch more corn borers. They researchers weren't able to do so, so Proxmire scored the points.

Vol, The defense department budget is one of the largest expenditures this country has. If we're going to be serious about reducing expenses, then the defense department budget must not be a sacred cow that can't be touched. As for the constitutionality of funding science research grants, there is a clause that states that Congress can expend funds to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Now this clause also includes a comma'ed "by" which reads "by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" which most of us would think means only granting patents and copyrights. But as has been proven time and again in government, both in Congress, the Executive and the Supreme Court, what seems obvious isn't neccessarily so. I've not delved into it further to see if there have ever been any constitutional challenges to NHS grants, but I can see a SCOTUS ruling that the "by" addition is meant not as a limiting factor on promoting Science and the useful Arts, but is meant as just one possible example. Edited to include intended word "only"(This message has been edited by calicopenn)

If you have your own EIN number, you will need to report your revenue and expenses on your own - and since it is a separate EIN number, there will be no need for the PTO to report it also.