CalicoPenn

I had a 1975 Ford Maverick - inherited it from my sister - when I finally got rid of it by calling Victory Auto Parts (Yeah - I got a whole $35 for it), the tow truck driver took it in to the street, drained the oil, then spent the next 30 minutes revving the engine trying to get it to seize. The drivers were having a contest 0 the first person to get a Maverick to seize within 30 minutes won $100. Apparently Mavericks had a bit of a reputation for loose pistons. I had a Ford Explorer Sport Trac - I traded it in with 225K miles on it - I changed the oil regularly - just don't tell my mechanic that regularly was about once every 75K miles. Now I change the oil as soon as the car yells at me to change the oil.

Well that's a rather harsh judgement to make about other Eagle Scouts, don't you think? They appear on this show, try pulling out some tried and true (and truly awful, frankly) BSA cooking techniques, and you're first thought is the quality of Eagle Scout may have gone down because the cooking techniques weren't as successful being translated in an indoor setting as they might have been in an outdoor camping setting? We've had a whole thread on here that pretty much boiled down to Cooking Merit Badge isn't very good at teaching cooking. And it isn't - its not supposed to be some all encompassing course in cooking. I didn't learn anything about cooking from cooking merit badge, or from the BSA, except how to cook basic foods for upwards of 200 people. I learned my culinary knife skills and how to really cook by working in restaurants. I don't think "he can cook" when I hear Eagle Scout - and I doubt anyone else does either.

I know this is late in the game but I'd like to point out that London, Ontario is about halfway between Buffalo, New York and Detroit, Michigan. Its about 550 miles away from NYC.

I'm gonna counter-vent here. When the BSA announced this, with the barest sketch of what they thought would be how things would shake out for the Cub Scout program (and giving no details on what the Boy Scout program might look like), they also made it pretty darn clear that they would be releasing the details later - sometime in 2018 for the Cub Scout program and a stay tuned for the Boy Scout program. Ok - I get it - folks are frustrated by what they see as a lack of communication on the details but my question to everyone is simply - why is it National's and/or your local Council's fault that people have been jumping the gun, and doing their planning, etc. etc. well before National was releasing any details on what the program would look like. They told us they would have the details of this later - sometime in 2018. It's only the 4th of January 2018- they've clearly not released any details (except to perhaps a few councils to run a beta test). Everything the volunteers have been planning may all be for nothing - it's based purely on speculation - their own - and not on anything that National has planned. Frankly, it's like anticipating the release of the next Star Wars movie when you know nothing of the plot and so you sit around thinking of everything you would like it to be and then get disappointed when the actual movie comes out. Am I defending National and the Council's here? Yes - yes I am - because it is not their fault that the people out in volunteer-land either can't comprehend their statements that details will be released in 2018 or don't have the patience to just sit back and wait until the details are released. If you should be frustrated with anyone, it should be with yourselves. You are jumping the gun - it's not the starter's fault when a runner starts before the gun fires. Its not that difficult to tell parents/prospective parents that the BSA hasn't release the plan yet and that you're all just patiently waiting.

J. Depp moved to France so at least one of them kept their promise.

Skeptic, Seton is a bit of a mixed bag. Yes, he found the bones of the wolves involved in the incident reported by the trapper (who actually made it to his cabin before the wolves could get to him) which proved the trapper's story to be true. But, his writing about wolves and other animals were highly anthropomorphic which led people to question the factual items in his stories. William Burroughs named Seton as one of the "sham naturalists", a nature faker that confused the American public by publishing fictional animal stories and embellished true tales from the viewpoint of the animals. On the other hand, his drawings of a series of ducks on one of his books inspired Roger Tory Peterson to draw and write his first field book on birds. Tahawk, I certainly can't argue with the facts presented in that reason article - but I can take exception to how utterly human-centric the article is. I come away with the distinct impression that nothing matters to this author unless something is proven harmful to humans. The conclusion seems to me to be as long as DDT doesn't harm humans (and it is true that there has been no studies have proved that DDT harms humans), then that is all that matters so we should just freely use it how we see fit. My takeaway is that the author is suggesting that sure, we know its harmful to animals and birds but so what - people will die of malaria if we don't use a substance that is safe for us - and to heck with the birds. I find that thinking just really sad - who cares if Bald Eagles or Peregrine Falcons have to go extinct as long as we can kill all of those malaria spreading mosquitoes! My response is that we do know that DDT is harmful in the environment, even if it isn't harmful to us (at least as far as we know), and that should be enough to make us pause and ask "is there something else we can do to have the same life-saving effect? Something like maybe a vaccine?" Here's the thing, Malaria is eminently curable these days. Even more to the point, there has been ongoing research in to creating a vaccine - which would be even more effective than trying to kill every living thing except humans within a 5 mile range of a small village - that is proving promising. If even just half the research money used to try to solve "erectile dysfunction" had been spent on something far more important than whether some old white guy could get it up, like say malaria vaccine research, maybe we wouldn't have to make this Faustian bargain about the use of DDT.

Until the late 1300's, the equivalent term for Girl referred to any child of any gender - girl or boy. If you were a "boy" in 1320, you were publicly called a girl. So how about we just keep the name as Boy to make up for all those years boys were once known as girls? Or keep it as Boy since I suspect most girls that will want to join the Boy Scouts will be those girls stereo-typically called Tomboys anyway. Or how about we just call it the BSA, or take a page from the US YMCA, that since 2010 has called themselves the Y, and call the BSA the B? No one told the YMCA or the BSA that they had to start serving girls. It is their choice to do so. No one is going to tell the Girl Scouts or the YWCA that they have to start serving boys - it will be there choice. But - the YMCA, at least in the US, is now open to men, women, boys, girls - heck, it's barely even nominally Christian these days - and they serve about 21 million people a year. The YWCA? About 2 million. Opening themselves up to females certainly hasn't hurt the YMCA none. But that's ok - change is hard to take - go ahead and have your wakes and go ahead and blame the decline of the BSA on girls if you want but know this - you should have had the wake ten or more years ago. This organization has been declining for years - and it hasn't had anything to do with gays, or girls, or God. It's become increasingly irrelevant in the urban-centric country we've become. The hey-day of the BSA is 1972 - they had 6,524,640 members then - the most they ever had. It went down to around 4 million through he 70's, then increased up to the 5 million range in the 80's, and has been steadily declining ever since so that membership is now around 2.7 million. To put that in to perspective, the population in 1972 was 209.9 Million people. In 2017, it is approximately 325 million people - that's a 55% increase in population since 1972. It seems natural that it would follow that the BSA's membership numbers would have increased by that same 55% to a little over 10 Million members during that time - but it hasn't - its declined quite a bit. Change is hard to take, but something has to be done to shake up this moribund institution if it's to continue to exist. If accepting girls in to the organization helps, then I'm all for it - and I think its a shame that the naysayers would prefer to take their tents and stay home rather than doing everything that can to keep the BSA going. Someone mentioned that their Scout Executive used the term "Conditional Scouters" - I have to agree - the naysayers are all conditional scouters - they love the organization as long as its under the condition that it always be the organization they think it should be.

I consider Baden-Powell, Seton, Beard and Audubon to be primarily naturalists. They studied plants and animals and/or encouraged others to study nature. They didn't spend much time on thinking about or encouraging the conservation of natural resources. Hornaday and T. Roosevelt I put in the ranks of conservationists (though Hornaday was zoologist which pretty much automatically makes him a naturalist too). Both were leaders in the forefront of conservation. Were any of them environmentalists? I would suggest no - they weren't really concerned with the systems of nature, the systems of the environment. Of the impact on outside forces working on the forests, fields and waters other than perhaps hunting and fishing pressures. Compared to naturalism and conservationism, environmentalism is still relatively young. I think an argument could be made that the first environmentalist was Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, a clarion call on the dangers of pesticides in the environment. In a lot of ways, I think sustainability is incorrectly lumped in with environmentalism and environmental science. Environmentalism is more about clean air, clean water, pollution control, toxin control, climate change, and its because sustainability is being shoe-horned into environmentalism and the sciences that its boring. Sustainability, in my opinion, has much more in common with conservationism. Sustainability is about the protection and management of, for lack of a better term, human-made resources - agriculture and energy. Wind, solar, geo-thermal, and tidal energy sources are considered sustainable because they aren't a finite resource like fossil fuels are. No one is making more coal and oil - once it's gone, it's gone. But the sun isn't expected to burn itself out for another few millions of years yet. If there are environmental benefits to switching to a more sustainable energy resources, well that's just a bonus. Sustainability's concern with chemical use in agriculture, about large mono-cropping operations, about CAFO's is more about making sure that farmland can remain productive and that the food we eat is nourishing (as a side for those unaware, not only are we continuing to lose farmland to development, we are losing more and more farmland to the land just being completely burnt out of nutrients to raise crops beyond the point where even synthetic (man-made) chemical nutrients can't sustain crops on those fields). Any environmental benefit is just a bonus. In my opinion, sustainability gets a bad rap from a lot of people because it is so tied in to the environmentalism movement (though its tied in mostly because the current sustainability leaders come from the environmental movement and not the conservation movement). Until the sustainable folks and the conservationists start to reach out and recognize how much they have in common, I suspect the sustainable movement will always be considered a boring stepchild of the environmental movement.

The people she is describing as naturalists are not naturalists (ok, they could be naturalists also but not in the context she is using the term). Naturalists study nature - especially plants and/or animals. In the context of climate change, naturalists are only concerned with it as a way to study how animals and plants react to it - they aren't advocating a position either way. Environmentalists work to preserve the environment - and yes, these days, it's pretty much done in the political zone. What she is comparing environmentalists to are better referred to as Conservationists. Conservationists work towards preserving and managing our natural resources. They're hunters creating shelter belts for deer, fisherfolk creating artificial ripples and rip-rapping to create/enhance trout habitat, they're prairie stewards pulling garlic mustard or doing controlled burns. These are just examples of course - there are many ways people can be conservationists. The thing about it is that people can be none of these, just one of these, two of these in any combination or all three. I happen to be a naturalist through both my childhood experiences ("I've been a serious birdwatcher since I was 10), and by training (My degree is in Environmental Education - I had a lot more science courses than education courses for that degree). I am still a serious birdwatcher, spent a lot of time studying dragonflies and damselflies in my 20's and 30's, and for the last couple of years have been paying a lot of attention to bumblebees. Because I am a naturalist, I am also an environmentalist with an interest in climate change policies. In my 45 years of serious birdwatching, and list keeping, I've seen the trends. I've seen flocks of robins wintering over in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin the past 10 years where it used to be rare to find just one in the winter. Northern Cardinals are southern birds - or at least they used to be - now they're wintering over in central Wisconsin. Northern Mockingbirds are southern birds as well - and were seeing more and more of them in Chicago were we never saw them before. Plant populations are changing too - Sugar Maples are starting to die off completely in the south - their range is shrinking. My favorite maple sirup place (yes - sirup - look it up) is worried that their sugar bush will be gone in the next 30 years - there are no new maple trees coming up. There are already indications that the sugar bush could completely disappear from Vermont, Maine, Wisconsin and Michigan in the next 75 years. Agriculturalists are worried that southern crops like Cotton and Tobacco, which need fairly long growing seasons, will supplant corn crops in Illinois, Indiana and Iowa in the next 100 years. Yes - this is mostly anecdotal evidence, but when you such a large diversity of anecdotal evidence to climate change, somethings up - and its enough to convince me its a real issue. And yes, we've chosen an arbitrary point to start looking at climate change - but its a point well within our personal experiences, and sure, maybe its all a coincidence that there has been a doubling of CO2 levels in the last 100 years and a change in natural history patterns during that time but I look at it this way - If I'm wrong about climate change, the actions I take won't do any harm. If the deniers in the political majority are wrong, their refusal to take action will do harm. Of course, I am also a conservationist. I'm one of those folks who go out and cut brush, pull invasive species. etc. I also drive an SUV - I'm a big guy, I'm getting older and less flexible - an SUV has a lot more room and I like to be comfortable. I eat red meat (though I do get my meat from local farmers who raise, slaughter and process locally). I don't fly anymore but not because of my carbon footprint but because I think the security theater is stupid. But I do like to travel and drive a lot - so much for a low carbon footprint. Am I a hypocrite? I plead not guilty. I'm not one of those environmentalists who are trying to tell other people how to live (I find most of those folks are people in their 20's - the "true believers" and that most of them grow out of it when they start to raise a family). However, I will continue to advocate for more sustainable and renewable energy development. Solar and wind will reduce a heck of a lot of carbon and be a boon to our economy and manufacturing sector as well

What are the parameters of the gift? Maximum cost? Is it a random choice type gift - everyone that brings a gift leaves with something? What movies were being discussed at camp - maybe a DVD of it (if it's within the cost parameters). The most popular song/artist - Lady Gaga? Someone else? CD perhaps of that person or with that song? Or maybe go with a Christmas theme - Target has the Jim Carrey Grinch movie for under 15 bucks. Or get the classic - A Charlie Brown Christmas. Or make up a Frosty the Snowman Kit - a cheap porkpie hat, cheap scarf, cheap pipe (corncob if you can find one), big button for the nose, two lumps of charcoal for eyes, 3 or 4 lumps of charcoal for "coat buttons" down the front of the snowman. Snow and stick arms not included.

I get where you're coming from but I think you have the right answer to the wrong question. If the question was does the committee (chair) have the right to tell the den leader to promote the sponsors troop, then yes, I fully agree with you. But that is not the question being asked. The questioned being asked is does the Committee Chair (or Chartering Organizatoin) have the right to tell the parents what Troop they MUST transition to and the answer to that must always be no. They can encourage it, they can try to force it by banning den visits to other units, but they cannot tell Parents (and their sons) what Troop they are allowed to join on crossing over. If they want to throw a fit and not do a crossover ceremony for any Webelos not joining the sponsored Troop, they can do that too. But they can not tell a parent or a Scout that they can't join any other Troop.

RH Macy would and the Gimbel brothers would. They used to send people to other stores all the time if they didn't have something. It may seem counter-intuitive but since customer service is the number one reason people have loyalty to stores, it makes perfect sense. Want to really impress a customer when you don't have something in stock that they need? Call a competitor to see if they have it in stock and then ask them to put it on hold for your customer. Yes - you might lose a single sale, but that customer is coming back.

Yes - it came from the BSA Health and Safety Team - they issue a lot of health and safety hints and tips - its one of the ways the BSA tries to educate folks. But they weren't creating policy or rules when they created this and made it available. They were providing folks with safety tips. No where does this say these are policies and rules of the BSA. I think you are missing my point - and my point is that too often, Scouters take these things that National sometimes creates and believe that they are now policies and rules when they are not meant to be. I can understand how people could take that list you've included and decide that because of the imperative mood, they much be rules or policies of the BSA. However, those are included in a list that begins "The following hammock safety points should be taken into consideration" - there is a key word in there - should. Those listed items aren't sitting alone in a vacuum. They are part and parcel of all the safety points that should (not must) be taken in to consideration. This is just a simple list of helpful hints and tips - lets not turn it in to something more than it is.

Yes - we have a responsibility to adhere to established program policies and rules - ACTUAL policies and rules. We also have a responsibility NOT to create our own policies and rules. Part of that means not turning things the BSA sends out as helpful hints or safety reminders that have nothing to do with policies and rules into some kind of defacto policy or rule and then get even more people upset about the ridiculous policies and rules that the BSA creates when the fact is the BSA never did so in the first place. These are NOT BSA policies and rules. They are simply safety tips to make hammock usage more enjoyable. They are as much policy and rules as tips in the Boy Scout Handbook on how to best site a tent.

I'm calling foul at use of a certain word here (which is included in the thread title). These are NOT BSA rules. These are not BSA policy. These are safety pointers - suggestions for using a hammock safely and without doing damage to trees. No where in any of this is the word must or any other word that would require you to follow these pointers. Everything is written on a "should" basis. We spend more than enough time going back of forth on actual rules and policies. Can we stop getting people all hyped up over things that are not intended to be policy or rules? Seriously, what's next? If the BSA were to put together pointers on making great blueberry pancakes which recommends that if using canned or thawed frozen blueberries, you drain the juice off first so that the pancakes don't turn green, will we then have to spend the next 5 years trying to calm people down that claim that it is a BSA rule to drain blueberries?

I think you need to get a lot more information about what it is the Pack is "supposed" to pay the Troop for. There is a possibility that no one's brought up yet - if your Pack has "Scout Accounts" where a portion of any fundraising you do is set aside on a per cub basis to help them pay for things like registration, outings, day camp, etc., it may be that the Pack at some point agreed to forward any money in those "Scout Accounts" to the Troop if the boy crosses over. My suggestion would be to flat out eliminate the Scout Accounts - they're a record keeping nightmare, and are mostly skirting on the wrong side of IRS regulations. Unless the Scout is depositing their own money in the accounts (in which case they should get whatever they haven't spent back when they leave the Pack), fundraising money belongs to the Pack. If a Scout were to crossover then leave the Troop after 2 months, you would be enriching the Troop's coffers at the expense of the Pack.

Can we take a step back a bit and go back to some basics? We're discussing one thing in the context of another which is getting both wrong. There are very few laws written to have a zero tolerance in them. Legislators don't like writing them and the Judiciary doesn't like being constrained by them. Even mandatory sentencing laws can be overcome with creative effort by a judge. By laws, I also include ordinances of municipal governments. What is being discussed are policies and not laws. Policies are created by non-legislative governmental bodies like school boards and library boards. They cannot pass laws, but they can create policies to govern their little fiefdoms. as long as the policies don't conflict with laws. Almost every instance we hear of about zero tolerance are zero tolerance school policies. The worst part about these policies is that it is the school board that enforces them. A school principle, bound by the school boards policies suspends a student - who does the student appeal to? The school board that created the policy. The student can take it to court but as long as the policy isn't an actual violation of state law, the policy is going to stand because states give school boards the right to create their own policies.

Scouting magazine's purpose - its reason for being - has always been to promote the agenda of the BSA. I remember getting Boys Life when I was a Scout - as a Cub Scout, I was excited to have my own magazine subscription with a magazine coming to my home addressed to me. I couldn't tell you about any of the articles in it. As a Boy Scout, it was just something that came in the mail - we dropped my subscription when I was 12 - my two younger brothers were getting it - I could read theirs. I will tell you flat out that the only things that I can remember reading (other than a few ads) were Pedro, Peewee Harris, Green Bar Bill and the Scouts in Action thing - thinking back, all of these were illustrated like comic books. It's not that I wasn't a reader - I read book after book after book when I was a kid - and I'm still a voracious reader (I'm 6 away from having read 300 books this year - and I will hit that mark easily). Maybe its the way my mind works - maybe its because I was (and still am) a huge fan of James Burke's BBC mini-series Connections - but I can't help but try to connect past discussions in this forum over the past few years about how these new parents/volunteers joining up have no experience with camping or the outdoors which is having a negative effect on "outing in Scouting" (yikes - just realized, with a certain new policy, that takes on a whole new meaning - happy Tampa?) and a lot of wondering how this can be fixed and here is Scouter Magazine, seeming to answer our wishes (quite accidentally I'm sure) by starting to promote camping outside of Scouting and here we are complaining about that!

Brother moved to Phoenix - bragged about it being 115 degrees and a "dry heat". Called to gloat when it was 15 below here - I responded "yeah, but it's a dry cold". Big City Snow Day Thresholds: Nashville = 1/2 inch Washington DC = 1" New York City = 8-10" Cleveland/Milwaukee = 12-14" Boston/Buffalo/Chicago/Minneapolis = "what's a snow day?" Winter Camping in Great Lakes States - many inches of snow - temps below 20. Winter camping in Orange County - 75 degrees and cloudy. Good luck building a quinzhee with sand.

Not that the Scouts pictured could have earned any of those merit badges anyway.

I'm going to suggest that the disaster you had was the Troops fault. You planned a Boy Scout outing an invited families. My Troop had a family camping weekend every other year - and never had the kinds of issues you faced. Why? Because we didn't plan a Boy Scout outing - we planned a Family outing. We camped in the same Boy Scout camp ground - used the big shelter for a "dining hall". The adult leaders cooked. The Scouts ran food from the kitchen to the tables (just like summer camp "waiters"). Dishes were washed by Scouts and adult leaders (we did cheat though and used paper plates and plastic utensils - much easier than trying to wash 100+ plates, bowls, sets of utensils, etc. without a summer camp dishwasher). Scouts ate with their families - and families often ended up grouped by who was in their son's patrol. The younger Scouts usually camped with their families - and that was fine. The older Scouts would usually camp together in a Scout only encampment. Patrols had to plan one activity for the siblings to do - it could be a camporee event that they enjoyed, a scavenger hunt, a camp wide game - Scouts and siblings were kept busy with the activities the Scouts came up with. Parents got to lounge around their campsites or the dining hall in the morning, and catch-up with the Scoutmaster and other leaders. In the afternoon, they were invited to go on a nature walk led by members of the Leadership Corps, or they could just hang back and read or chat. Each patrol had to come up with a Saturday night campfire skit - the campfire was prepared and hosted by the SPL and Leadership Corps. Since the Troops sister Explorer Post was a native american-style dance post, and most of the post members were also part of the Troop, the Post provided some of the entertainment as well. The campfire always started at 7:30 and ended at 8:30. Towards the end of the campfire, members of the Leadership Corp would use shovels to scoop still burning logs from the main campfire and take them to smaller campfire set-ups in the area and set them to blaze. At the end of the campfire program, we usually had 4 additional fires going and folks split up to make and enjoy marshmallows and s'mores. This campout wasn't a time for working on advancement. It was a time for the families to hang out and get to know each other better. More than that, it was way for the Troop leaders and Scouts to thank their families for their support.

That's a good question - my answer would be that the Social Security Administration does not consider sleep apnea to be a disability qualifying someone for disability benefits so no, it is not a disability. It is a medical condition and just because something is a medical condition doesn't mean its a disability.

Remember why he created the Boy Scouts in the first place - he was disillusioned on the battlefield by the lack of preparedness his soldiers had for basic outdoor skills needed by soldiers. Orienteering, cooking outdoors, first aid, signalling, setting up camps, etc. So keeping that in mind, and that one of his goals was to better prepare boys to be better prepared to become soldiers, I think if he were around now, with the military we now have, he would be insisting girls be part of the program since women are now soldiers so both boys and girls should be better prepared for that, and that he would more fully embrace the STEM side of things since a great deal of modern warfare and soldiering relies of high technology.

I'll be blunt - if an adult can't go to summer camp for a week, or camp out for a weekend, without using a CPAP machine, then they don't belong in the woods with the Scouts in the first place. These machines are being used to treat something the doctors like to call "obstructive sleep apnea" and I like to call snoring. The medical community has come up with a new way to separate people/insurance companies from their money by declaring something that has been happening for millennia a "severe health problem". Severe? Deaths by sleep apnea are extremely rare - like immeasurably rare. Oh, the medical establishment will scare folks by saying that around 38 thousand people a year who die of cardiac issues (out of over 600,000 per year) also had sleep apnea and that points to a connection that mustn't be trifled with (yeah, and over 600,000 people who die of cardiac issues every year drink water - water must be a contributing factor in their deaths too) but does it really contribute (most people with sleep apnea apparently don't ever have cardiac issues) or is it a coincidence? Oh sure, a lot of people say they sleep better at night and I won't fault them for that but lets stop buying the "severe health problem" bs and just admit they're being used for this very reason, to sleep better at night. You can survive a week without using it. Otherwise, if we are going to insist that CPAP machines are being used to treat a severe medical condition, then a condition that severe that it requires the use of a positive pressure machine to keep folks breathing should be an automatic disqualifier for leading groups in to the outdoors - if your condition is that bad that you need a machine to keep you alive, then its bad enough to keep you home in bed. My recommendation? Don't spend any money on this - make the needed use of a CPAP machine at camp a disqualifying health event, just like you would keep someone with the measles or mumps from attending camp. And before anyone accuses me of not understanding what these machines are, I was on a hospital grade positive pressure machine for over a week after my lung biopsy - it was used to help inflate my lung (because they collapse like a balloon during a biopsy). A proper positive airway machine doesn't just keep a constant flow of air/oxygen going in to your lungs - it actually pumps air in - you know you have the real deal when you have a full nose/mouth mask pumping away on your face. These CPAP machines? They just take air from an external pump and let it flow through your nostrils at a steady rate. Know what else does that? An oxygen bottle with a nasal canula. The CPAP machines are just oxygen generating machines that leave out the oxygen generating part.